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****PROCESS CPs****
1NC Decadal Survey CP
Text: The National Research Council should include that the _______________________ as a Priority 1 recommendation in the 2014-2023 Decadal Survey for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The CP results in the plan and builds consensus
Space Politics, 3/23/11 (“Would a Human Spaceflight Decadal Survey be Useful?” , Sawyer)
Tucked away in last year’s NASA authorization act is a provision calling for an independent study about human spaceflight: SEC. 204. INDEPENDENT STUDY ON HUMAN EXPLORATION OF SPACE. (a) IN GENERAL.-In fiscal year 2012 the Administrator shall contract with the National Academies for a review of the goals, core capabilities, and direction of human space flight, using the goals set forth in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2008, the goals set forth in this Act, and goals set forth in any existing statement of space policy issued by the President. The study’s scope, timeframe (the legislation calls for “findings and recommendations” for fiscal years 2014-2023), and use of the National Academies has caused many people to liken this to the decadal surveys used in various space science disciplines, such as the recently-released planetary science decadal survey . But would such a study for human spaceflight be effective? That question was debated last week during the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation “Living in Space” session , part of the Satellite 2011 trade show in Washington. While the session was sparsely attended, with no more than about 15 people in the audience, the event featured a good debate about whether such a study will make much of a difference in shaping the long-term future of human spaceflight. “Part of the problem, the reason why we’ve been going around and around and around, is that we have not been forced to reach a consensus” on the goals of human spaceflight, said NASA’s Phil McAlister. “This is why I believe in this Academies-like study that will allow the human spaceflight community to come together, like the science community has done for years and years, effectively.” “With that kind of document and blueprint… then finally, maybe, we can get the long-term consensus required to actually finish one of these programs,” he said. “That is my sincere hope.”
The net benefit is politics
Smith, 9 – editor of Space Policy Online (7/7/09, Marcia, “White House and Congressional Staff Brief NRC Planetary Science Decadal Survey Committee,” , Sawyer)
Their message was in contrast to what the committee heard from NASA's Jim Green the previous day. Dr. Green urged the committee to wait for the FY2011 budget that will be released next February, which he believes will better reflect Obama Administration priorities. The OMB/OSTP message also was in contrast to remarks by Dick Obermann and Ed Feddeman of the House Science and Technology Committee staff who reminded the group that it is Congress that ultimately decides budgets. Representing the Democratic and Republican viewpoints respectively, both advised the committee to focus their deliberations on the top scientific priorities, not the budget. While acknowledging that there are no blank checks, they stressed that if the science is sufficiently compelling, Congress could make additional funds available.
notes
A brief explanation of a decadal survey ---
Dewhurst writes
Conducted roughly every ten years, these “decadal surveys” summarize the current state of knowledge in the field and then look ahead and identify the most important scientific questions to be addressed and the tools needed to address them. From a policy perspective, the key feature of these reports is a prioritized list of ground- and space-based observatories requiring federal investment. The process by which the survey is conducted is designed to sift and funnel the various proposals for new observatories into a single prioritized list for the government to implement.
NASA’s Lunar Science Institute writes
What is the Decadal Survey? The National Research Council (NRC) conducts studies that provide a science community consensus on key questions posed by NASA and other U.S. Government agencies. The broadest of these studies in NASA’s areas of research are decadal surveys. As the name implies, NASA and its partners ask the NRC once each decade to look out ten or more years into the future and prioritize research areas, observations, and notional missions to make those observations.
2nc Ext: solvency
The CP generates consensus that guarantees implementation
Day, 9 – research associate at the Space Policy Institute in the 1990s (6/8/09, Dwayne, The Space Review, “Space Policy 101: Civil Space 2009,” , Sawyer)
The second step, according to Smith, is determining priorities. The NRC’s “decadal surveys” determine ten-year priorities for space science disciplines and for aeronautics based upon the consensus reached by the relevant communities. Right now the NRC is undertaking decadal surveys in astronomy and astrophysics, planetary exploration, and life and microgravity sciences, and NASA is currently starting to implement the priorities established in the first Earth sciences decadal survey completed two years ago.
And it has extreme credibility – ensures solvency
Dillow, 3/8/11 – contributor and researcher at Popular Science (Clay, Popular Science, “Joint International Mars Mission in Jeopardy as America Comes Up $1 Billion Short,” , Sawyer)
This news comes via a new report from the U.S. National Research Council (officially titled “Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022,” though many are referring to it as the “planetary decadal survey”) that says NASA is realistically about $1 billion short. The decadal survey is purely advisory at this point, but it does have weight; conducted by a group of independent scientists, it is viewed as a barometer of the larger space and planetary science community’s feelings and therefore is taken seriously by NASA policymakers.
Even if the recommendation isn’t implemented we still solve
Space Politics, 3/23/11 (“Would a Human Spaceflight Decadal Survey be Useful?” , Sawyer)
Smith added that while decadal surveys look good to outsiders, they have their flaws and drawbacks as well. Well-connected scientists, she said, can do end runs around the surveys and win funding for their own programs regardless of their standing in the surveys’ final reports. Last year’s astrophysics decadal survey generated controversy when, instead of recommending one of the many mission concepts presented to it as the community’s top priority, it created a new mission called WFIRST. “There is this myth that somehow decadal surveys solve all of your problems,” she said.
And the CP builds scientific consensus – that guarantees support for the plan
Dewhurst, 6 – Senior Program Associate for the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy (3/6/06, Brian D. Dewhurst, The Space Review, “NASA, Astronomers, and the Establishment of Research Priorities,” , Sawyer)
The decadal survey process is of considerable value to both the astronomy community and to the science agencies, in part because the survey process directly engages the community. For example, the decadal survey committee and panels that conducted the survey in 1999–2000 were comprised of 125 astronomers from around the nation, and dozens more participated through various information gathering sessions. By engaging such a large fraction of the nation’s astronomers, the survey process is able to credibly represent the consensus of the community as a whole. Debates between members of the community are held inside the survey process, and the members of the community choose the winners and losers. When agencies such as NASA and the National Science Foundation fund the missions included on the decadal survey priority list, they are confident that the taxpayers’ dollars are supporting the most valuable projects. Furthermore, the consensus nature of the reports can be used as a shield against lobbying on behalf of individual projects, saving agency officials and congressional staff from having to be the arbiters of scientific disputes—roles they may not be qualified to play. Historically, the large majority of projects recommended in the decadal surveys have been completed, without messy public debates such as those which accompanied the Superconducting Supercollider. The result is a win-win situation for the astronomers and the government: the government is confident that it is investing in the most valuable observatories, and the astronomers are confident that their desires are being heard and acted upon by the government. Perhaps the biggest testament to the value of the astronomy and astrophysics decadal surveys is that in the late 1990s, NASA requested that the National Academies conduct decadal surveys for the other scientific areas in NASA’s portfolio such as planetary exploration, solar and space physics, and earth sciences.
Even the NASA Administrator concludes neg – the CP effectively shapes policy
SpaceRef, 6 (7/6/06, NASA, “Remarks by NASA Administrator Griffin to the NASA Advisory Council Science Subcommittees,” , Sawyer)
When it comes to space science priorities, we are guided by the decadal surveys of the National Academy of Sciences, and I'm glad that we'll soon have a decadal survey for Earthscience priorities. This brings us to your role. We've specifically asked for your collective and personal advice as to how we carry out NASA's science programs - astrophysics, heliophysics, planetary science, and Earth science. In this town, advice is often freely given, but in your case, we're actively seeking it. You are some of the most senior representatives and emerging leaders of your respective fields of endeavor. So, I offer my thanks to you all for agreeing to be part of the NASA Advisory Council's science subcommittees.
And the CP is key to the sustainability of the plan
Atkins and Newton, 10 – *Chuck, former chief of staff to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology AND **Elizabeth, director for aerospace and defense policy at the University of Alabama (5/10/10, Space News, “Take the Chaos out of U.S. Space Policy,” , Sawyer)
Similar to the way the science community does it, an external, independent review body would be managed to assess human space exp1oration's relevance to stakeholders and to develop priorities for a six- to 10-year span The process would produce assessments of relevance and priorities, not instructions on how to execute them, and would be organized thematically around major, compelling questions about humans' future in space. Central, compelling questions such as, "Can humans ‘live off the land?” and “Are there commercially valuable resources?" could serve as organizing principles for the activity since a questions- oriented approach makes it easier to keep stakeholders engaged and committed to the undertaking.
2nc Ext: solvency (enviro-sats)
Environment satellites have been implemented as a result of past recommendations
SciencePoles, 10 (8/31/10, International Polar Foundation, “NASA’s ICESat Satellites has Re-Entered Earth’s Atmosphere after Final Successful Scientific Mission,” , Sawyer)
After seven years in orbit and 15 laser-operations campaigns, ICESat's science mission ended in February 2010. Anticipating the end of the ICESat mission, and in accordance with the National Research Council's Decadal Survey of future NASA Earth science missions, NASA has begun development of ICESat-2. The launch of ICESat’s successor, which will prolong the legacy of its predecessor and improve our understanding of the Earth’s Polar Regions through advanced technology, is planned for 2015.
NASA has advocated the CP before
Committee on Science, 5 (4/28/05, House of Representatives, One Hundred Ninth Congress, First Session, , Sawyer)
NASA has also requested that the National Research Council generate a community-led decadal survey for Earth science. We are still digesting the recently received NRC Earth Science Decadal Survey Phase One Report, and we will carefully consider its recommendations together with our partners at NOAA.
2nc AT: delay
No delay – priority 1 means the plan gets implemented quickly
Anderson et. al, 8 (Donald Anderson, Kenneth W. Jucks, David F. Young, members of the NRC, NASA Langley Research Survey, “The NRC Decadal Survey Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory: NASA Implementation,” , Sawyer)
NASA will be implementing all of the Decadal Survey missions as directed missions, prioritized roughly by their order in the launch queue defined by the NRC. Langley Research Center (LaRC) has been the identified as the lead for CLARREO. Working with the Program Scientist and Program Executive at NASA HQ and the Earth Systematic Missions Program Office at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the LaRC team has defined an integrated Pre-Phase A mission study plan leading to a mission implementation decision by the end of FY09. The goal is to refine the mission definition sufficiently by the end of FY09 so that CLARREO will be ready to be the next mission start following SMAP and ICESat II. The Decadal Survey recommendations represent the integration of community input on the future direction of Space-based Earth science. NASA will continue to engage the community to refine the mission requirements during the planning for CLARREO and the other recommended missions. This process began with the first CLARREO workshop held in July 2007 and will continue with the next two CLARREO workshops scheduled in Fall 2008 and Summer 2009.
2nc Ext: doesn’t link to ptx
The CP generates support for the plan – makes Congress is willing to fund the plan – empirics prove
Foust, 11 – editor and publisher of The Space Review (4/4/11, Jeff, The Space Review, “Tough Decisions Ahead for Planetary Exploration,” , Sawyer)
Squyres and others sought to portray the proposed budget not as a fait accompli, but instead something that could be changed if the scientific community got behind the decadal survey and lobbied Congress for the funding necessary to carry out those missions. Some note that while planetary science sees decreased funding in the future in the budget proposal, Earth science gets an increase, in part because that community has rallied to support missions identified in its own decadal survey a few years ago.
Congress respects the CP – they won’t backlash
Tapley and Tsaoussi, 9 (Byron D. Tapley, Lucia S. Tsaoussi, Earth Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council Science Committee Chair and Executive Secretary, October 15, 2009, , Sawyer)
Dr. Freilich explained that mid-term reviews are mandated by Congress; the subcommittee may request certain things be included in one. Raising the alarm, if the subcommittee thinks it warranted, would be a legitimate role. But he warned the group that a Decadal Survey’s cachet is huge; Congress respects it. Therefore the subcommittee should be careful in what it requests in the mid-term review. To cover delays, the Decadal Survey contains language about moving broken vehicles into a breakdown lane – that is, if a project gets out of its programmatic box, pushing it aside and doing the next project – but this notion fails to take into account the interests of constituencies that don’t like being pushed aside. Further, too many cars seem to be breaking down and ending up in the breakdown lane. There has to be a balance.
The CP’s credibility generates priorities that makes congress motivated to pass the plan
Langley Research Center, 7 (2/2/07, Researcher News, “Resetting National Priorities: Implications of the NRC Decadal Study on Science Research at NASA Langley,” , Sawyer)
In reaction to recent discussions on climate change, researchers in NASA Langley's Science Directorate (SD), the Systems Engineering Directorate (SED), and throughout the Center are asking how fast is the change happening, and what can we do to better understand this process. On Friday, January 26, some of their questions were answered when Dr. Lelia Vann, Science Directorate director, with Dr. Ed Browell, also of the SD, gave a presentation on the results of a recent Earth science report from the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report, called the Decadal Survey, is a community-based document that provides consensus views of frontier science opportunities for maintaining the Nation's scientific leadership. Vann introduced the report, called "Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond." The Decadal Survey, a 10-year-plan for U.S. Earth science missions, was released by the NAS on Jan. 15 at the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting in San Antonio. The assessment provides a well-respected source for community priorities and the scientific motivations to the funding research and operational agencies and the Congress.
And it provides strong justification for the plan – that resolves the link
Committee on Science, 5 (4/28/05, House of Representatives, One Hundred Ninth Congress, First Session, , Sawyer)
Second, I applaud the Earth science community for undertaking a decadal survey of Earth science and applications from space. This survey, co-chaired by Dr. Moore and operated under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, is long overdue. Like the decadal surveys that the astronomy community has produced for the last four decades and the decadal survey that the solar system exploration community published in 2002, this decadal survey for Earth science and applications from space will provide a rationale for the most important missions and programs that NASA should undertake in the coming decade, established on the basis of sufficient community input and set out with sufficient clarity so that the program is seen by all as both achievable in scope and compelling in vision.
And the CP is key to sustainable policymaking – this prevents the perception of NASA failure and avoids political backlash
Goldstein, 7 – PhD, Instructor American University, The Catholic University of America and Georgetown University Writer/Editor, NASA (Fall 2007, Edward, Imagining Notes, “NASA’s Earth Science Program: Learning from Past Events to Project the Future,” Volume 22, Number 3, , Sawyer)
The move to create the Decadal Survey had its origins in a 2003 conversation between Lennard Fisk, a former NASA Associate Administrator for Science and the newly appointed head of the National Research Council’s Space Studies Board, and Ghassem Asrar, NASA’s Earth science director from 1998-2005. Said Fisk (in a personal communication): "I took over the Space Studies Board and I looked around. And everybody else had a Decadal (Survey). I viewed Earth science as being in disarray and being penalized in part for lack of strategy. There was a criticism that the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) leveled on Ghassem when (NASA Administrator Dan) Goldin was still there: "Where’s your strategy?" And without a strategy you’re in the penalty box sort of thing. You just see a program that is crying out for a Decadal (Survey). So we went and sold (it). And we sold it also to NOAA. It’s jointly funded by NOAA and NASA. I wasn’t unaware of how hard this is. The Earth science community is far more fractured than many of the other science communities, and also... there’s a variety of emotions that have run through this, I suspect. One of them is that there is kind of the Rodney Dangerfield view of things—no respect. They’ve been disappointed so many times by NASA. They went from being this flagship program extraordinaire, the largest science program ever, to being on really hard times... And then you have the different parts of the community that don't necessarily see things collectively. But the two chairs of this, Berrien Moore and Rick Anthes, I think are doing a superb job of bringing the community along in a systematic way to have a real product that they can be proud of."
2nc Ext: fiscal discipline net benefit
And the CP avoids the spending link – perceived as responsible spending
Foust, 11 – editor and publisher of The Space Review (4/4/11, Jeff, The Space Review, “Tough Decisions Ahead for Planetary Exploration,” , Sawyer)
Last month the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council released the final report of the planetary sciences decadal survey, documenting the community’s priorities for future planetary science missions from 2013 through 2022. The report, similar to those prepared in astronomy, earth science, and other disciplines, provides guidance to NASA on what missions scientists believe the agency should be funding as part of its planetary science program. The report was rolled out at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) in Houston by the study’s chair, Steve Squyres, the Cornell University planetary scientist best known for his role as the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rovers program. In his presentation at LPSC, he talked a packed ballroom of planetary scientists, and others watching via webcast, through the report. “All of the priorities, and all of the recommendations, were guided as strongly as we could be guided by community inputs,” he said, referring to the long process of working group meetings and white paper submissions. Working groups in several areas—Mars, other inner planets, giant planets, and so on—developed priorities within their own disciplines that were then synthesized by the steering committee. He said the final priorities were made by “very strong consensus”, often by a unanimous vote of the 16-member steering committee. One major difference between this survey and previous decadal surveys, Squyres said, was an emphasis on affordability, specifically, selecting programs that would fit into the long-term projected budget profile for NASA’s planetary science program. “What that did was make it necessary for us to put attention on not just the science, but also on the costs of the science,” he said. That would have major implications for their recommendations.
2nc AT: perm do both
Competing priorities decks solvency
Dewhurst, 6 – Senior Program Associate for the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy (3/6/06, Brian D. Dewhurst, The Space Review, “NASA, Astronomers, and the Establishment of Research Priorities,” , Sawyer)
NASA’s request for additional decadal surveys shows how far the agency had swung towards the science agency culture. By requesting the surveys, NASA was asking the scientific communities to set the agency’s science priorities for the coming decade. When the Vision for Space Exploration was released with its own set of priorities for the agency, the competing priorities were set on a collision course. The former set of priorities was filtered from the bottom up, while the latter directed from the top down. The agency needs to find a way to reconcile the two sets of priorities in a decision-making process that keeps the best science while preparing it to complete its mission.
And the perm wrecks consensus – that means the perm doesn’t solve
Atkins and Newton, 10 – *Chuck, former chief of staff to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology AND **Elizabeth, director for aerospace and defense policy at the University of Alabama (5/10/10, Space News, “Take the Chaos out of U.S. Space Policy,” , Sawyer)
It is time for human space exploration to be put on similar footing so that the political decisions are less about what the priorities, goals and missions axe, and more about how many the country can afford at a given point in time, especially relative to other national needs. A managed and regular prioritization process should replace episodic, ad hoc presidential commissions in order to ensure that the compelling questions for human space exploration are asked and answered with an enduring consensus in an accountable way and that diverse and iconoclastic views are considered.
2nc AT: perm do the cp
Severs – should requires immediate effect
Summer 94 (Justice, Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant”, )
4 The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should"13 in the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16 ¶5 Nisi prius orders should be so construed as to give effect to every words and every part of the text, with a view to carrying out the evident intent of the judge's direction.17 The order's language ought not to be considered abstractly. The actual meaning intended by the document's signatory should be derived from the context in which the phrase to be interpreted is used.18 When applied to the May 18 memorial, these told canons impel my conclusion that the judge doubtless intended his ruling as an in praesenti resolution of Dollarsaver's quest for judgment n.o.v. Approval of all counsel plainly appears on the face of the critical May 18 entry which is [885 P.2d 1358] signed by the judge.19 True minutes20 of a court neither call for nor bear the approval of the parties' counsel nor the judge's signature. To reject out of hand the view that in this context "should" is impliedly followed by the customary, "and the same hereby is", makes the court once again revert to medieval notions of ritualistic formalism now so thoroughly condemned in national jurisprudence and long abandoned by the statutory policy of this State. [Continues – To Footnote] 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase denotes that which in law is presently or immediately effective, as opposed to something that will or would become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).
Severs the process – scientific decadal surveys aren’t a part of policymaking
Dewhurst, 6 – Senior Program Associate for the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy (3/6/06, Brian D. Dewhurst, The Space Review, “NASA, Astronomers, and the Establishment of Research Priorities,” , Sawyer)
Even if such a conversation were possible, it is unclear how such a conversation might take place. Administrator Griffin chose to disband NASA’s advisory committees until he could rework how they functioned. Historically, the advisory committees have been the venue in which the agency’s top-down priorities and the community’s bottom-up priorities have been brought together. NASA has reestablished the NASA Advisory Council, but without its previous scientific subcommittees are in place. Without these committees, it is unclear how or whether the scientific community is able to have input into NASA’s decision-making process when decisions need to be made on a short timescale.
**Aff – decadal survey
No leadership means the CP isn’t taken seriously
Space Politics, 3/23/11 (“Would a Human Spaceflight Decadal Survey be Useful?” , Sawyer)
Marcia Smith of , who previously worked at the National Academies, is more skeptical of the utility of a human spaceflight decadal survey. One concern she has is the scope of such a study. “You don’t do a decadal survey for ‘space science.’ The communities are too diverse,” she said. Instead, there are separate decadals for astronomy, planetary science, and other fields, narrow enough to make it likely to achieve consensus on goals. “I do not believe you can do that with human spaceflight, and I have been encouraging everyone I know to not call this thing that Congress is requesting a decadal survey.” Scientific decadal surveys also benefit from strong leadership from scientists universally accepted by the community, such as Mars scientist Steve Squyres in the recent planetary science decadal or Roger Blandford in the astronomy and astrophysics decadal released last year. Smith wondered if there was a person with similar standing in the human spaceflight community to lead this study. “The human spaceflight community is so fragmented, and there are so many groups that want to do this, that, or the other, I cannot think of a single individual” with the standing of a Blandford or Squyres, she said. Anyone selected, she suggested, should be somewhat younger than chairs of past space studies like Norm Augustine and Tom Young. “I don’t know an individual who has that kind of support in the human spaceflight community, whatever that is,” she said.
Links to the net benefit – Obama still gets blamed
Goldstein, 7 – PhD, Instructor American University, The Catholic University of America and Georgetown University Writer/Editor, NASA (Fall 2007, Edward, Imagining Notes, “NASA’s Earth Science Program: Learning from Past Events to Project the Future,” Volume 22, Number 3, , Sawyer)
While NASA has welcomed the Decadal Survey as a useful tool for guiding the development of future missions, and Administrator Michael Griffin has expressed pride in NASA's leadership role in the Earth science field, he also has said the survey's proposed budget increases for Earth science at NASA may be unrealistic. Or, as he put it in the Goddard Space Symposium speech last March, "When the Decadal Surveys, including the Earth science report, publish rough cost estimates for several missions that are obviously off the mark by a factor of two or more, we have a self-inflicted problem within the space community that affects the credibility of all." The more immediate question facing NASA's Earth science program is whether NASA will receive a budget increase above the President's proposal that will allow for growth in the Earth science mission. As of this writing, the President has said he will veto any domestic spending measures that come in above his budget proposal.
The CP guts plan solvency
Tapley and Tsaoussi, 9 (Byron D. Tapley, Lucia S. Tsaoussi, Earth Science Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council Science Committee Chair and Executive Secretary, October 15, 2009, , Sawyer)
Dr. Jacob stated his understanding that the stimulus money and the ESD budget increase were directed toward implementing the Decadal Survey. But it is not possible for NASA to implement the Decadal Survey; he asked if that creates an accountability problem. Dr. Weiler replied that it is clear that $400M in one fiscal year will not implement $10B or $20B of missions. He explained that he and Dr. Freilich had had to educate Congress, to explain that funding is needed continuously for the missions that are foundational to the Decadal Survey. Dr. Jacob commented that trying to implement the Decadal Survey has resulted in emphasis on tier I missions, at the cost of tier II and tier III missions. Some tier I missions have been transformed since the Decadal Survey and are different from what was described in the Decadal Survey report by adding requirements and increasing costs. For the Decadal Survey’s mid-term review, he suggested, NASA should be thinking more broadly about its investments in Earth Science.
CP fails – NASA will reassert control and not implement the plan
Dewhurst, 6 – Senior Program Associate for the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy (3/6/06, Brian D. Dewhurst, The Space Review, “NASA, Astronomers, and the Establishment of Research Priorities,” , Sawyer)
Unfortunately, the first steps in defining a new relationship between the science priorities of the stakeholders and the needs of NASA as a reinvigorated mission agency have not gone smoothly. In an attempt to reassert the mission agency culture, NASA’s FY2005 budget request, released in February 2004, divided the agency’s science portfolio into “exploration science” and “other science” categories. The agency proposed that funding for science in the “other” category would remain essentially flat until 2020, while exploration would roughly double in size over the same period. In astronomy, the tilt was incredibly pronounced. NASA proposed in mid-2004 to accelerate the third-ranked space observatory in the decadal survey, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and to double its proposed scope. To fund this acceleration and expansion, the second-ranked priority and a suite of other missions the agency had been planning were postponed indefinitely. This decision was based on NASA’s interpretation of the Vision for Space Exploration and its determination that the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission was exploration-oriented and the other missions were not. In short, NASA was asserting its mission priorities over the astronomers’ science priorities.
1NC STP Recommendation CP
Text: The United States Office of Science and Technology Policy should recommend that the United States federal government should (do the plan). The Executive Branch of the United States federal government should provide the OSTP with all necessary resources to promote its recommendations.
OSTP recommendation results in the aff
Holdren 2010 – director of office of technology and science development (January 26th, “Message from OSTP director John P. Holdren”
President Obama has repeatedly articulated the indispensable role that science, technology, and innovation (ST&I) must play if the great challenges of our time are to be met. The President has made ST&I a core priority through the appointments he has made, the policy initiatives he has launched, and the budgets he has proposed—bringing Federal funding for ST&I to its highest level in history and committing to doubling the budgets of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s laboratories. The President also recognizes that innovation blossoms best in an open environment, where ideas are shared freely and ingenuity from a wide array of contributors is encouraged. So it is no coincidence that OSTP is not only a central element of the Federal government’s innovation agenda but also home to the White House Open Government Initiative. OSTP in fact has three main missions, all of which are strengthened by open government. First, OSTP provides the President with advice about technology and innovation that can strengthen our economy, generate jobs, and lead to breakthroughs that can improve the lives of all Americans. But innovation is not just about technology. The Nation can benefit greatly from innovations in the way our government institutions work, too. Indeed, achieving America’s potential for advancement through technological innovation requires innovation in government, and that is what the Open Government Initiative is all about. Second, OSTP ensures that Executive Branch policies are informed by sound science. Open government helps OSTP fulfill this mission by enhancing data availability and information-sharing across academic disciplines, governmental bodies, the public and private sectors, and nations around the world. Armed with the vastly expanded body of knowledge that such a network enables, OSTP and the Administration are better able to hew to reliable evidence in their decision-making processes. Third, OSTP is responsible for coordination and cooperation on ST&I issues across Executive Branch departments, agencies, and offices. Of course, the prerequisites for coordination and cooperation are communication and mutual access to relevant data, and the Open Government Initiative is designed to promote these prerequisites within the government as well as between the government and citizens. In his inauguration address, the President promised to restore science to its rightful place in American policymaking. The OSTP Open Government Plan that follows is a critical element of getting that done. As a distinct office within the Executive Office of the President, OSTP is bound by the Open Government Directive to write an Open Government Plan. But this is no mere box-checking exercise for us. As I’ve indicated above, openness is core to the mission and culture of OSTP. That is why I have instructed my colleagues to post this plan for your comments and feedback. It is not a final product but the first draft of a living document we are committed to revising and updating with your input. Please share your ideas and help OSTP do its part in moving toward a more open government and a more innovative, productive, and participatory society. OSTP has been at the forefront of participatory policymaking in the Executive Branch. In his January 21, 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, President Obama directed the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to issue recommendations for creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. To that end, OSTP, together with its partners in the White House Open Government Initiative, solicited expertise from across the United States by running a three-phase public consultation (brainstorm, discussion, drafting) process from May 21 through July 6, 2009. This complemented an earlier online brainstorming with government employees, numerous face-to-face events around the country, and dozens of submissions received via electronic mail and posted to the White House Open Government Initiative () website. To that end, OSTP conducted an interactive, online discussion, focusing on three main areas of interest: • Implementation: Which Federal Agencies are good candidates to adopt public access policies? • Features and Technology: In what format should articles and data be submitted in order to make them easy to search and retrieve, and to make them easy for others to link to it? • Management: What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? Public comment was so successful that the discussion was extended by several weeks. OSTP scientists and advisors are currently studying public comments and plan to submit recommendations to senior officials soon.
2nc solvency spin
If we win the CP is theoretically legitimate we are probably going to win that it solves – it has the president push the plan using a distinct policy instrument – the OSTP budget recommendations, which means that it will happen in February
Clemins 2010 - Director for the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program (Patrick J., December 16th, “overview of federal research and development funding” )
Joint memorandum from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) lays out Presidential priorities λ Agencies deliver budget justifications to OMB λ President releases budget on the first Monday in February λ Congress approves budget resolution, the big-picture spending plan λ Appropriation committees write and approve 12 appropriations bills λ The fiscal year ends on Sept 30, any unfunded agency must shutdown unless a continuing resolution (CR) is passed
Bipart support for the OSTP guarantees the recommendation is passed
US Government Printing Office 2002 (May 22nd, “federal research and development budget and the national science foundation” )
In particular, among the provisions of the President's Management Agenda are investment criteria for research programs pilot-tested at DOE this past year. In consultation with stakeholders from agencies, industry, and academia, OMB and OSTP are broadening the use of the criteria to all types of R&D programs across the government in 2004. Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I hope that this overview has conveyed to you the extent of this Administration's commitment to advancing science and technology in the national interest. I look forward to achieving bipartisan support for a national S&T strategy that will combine the resources of industry, academia, non-profit organizations, and all levels of government to protect our citizens, advance knowledge, promote education, strengthen institutions, and develop human potential. I ask for your support of OSTP's Fiscal Year 2003 budget request, and I also want you to know how much I appreciate the long-standing bipartisan support of this Subcommittee for the Office of Science and Technology Policy and for the science and technology enterprise. I would be pleased to answer any questions.
ONLY the counterplan provides Congress a link shield – sequencing means any permutation still links
Space Politics 2007 (February 26th, “A Window of opportunity for export control reform” )
The strategy proposed by David Garner, a retired Air Force colonel responsible in part for the current regulations, is to have a presidential commission study the issue and propose solutions; this would provide some political cover for members of Congress who might otherwise be less willing to back reform. Otherwise, Garner warns, “If we don’t take the opportunity, politics is going to eat us alive and, frankly, my good friends across the Atlantic will take advantage, as they have for the last seven years, of the legislation we created and they’re just going to continue to beat the crap out of us.”
OSTP can bully other agencies to ensure the plan’s implementation
Stine 2009 – Specialist in science and technology policy (Deborah D., June 3rd, “The President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Issues for Congress, )
The OSTP Director does not have direct authority over federal agencies or the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Rather, the OSTP Director uses his or her role as a “bully pulpit” to encourage federal agencies, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and others in the S&T community to take or stop taking actions that the Administration supports or opposes. Box 1 below provides an overview of the OSTP Director’s role in the budget process and that individual’s interaction with OMB.
OSTP recommendation turns into policy
Simpson 2011 - a British Computer Scientist. He is Director of Studies, Software Engineering Programme at University of Oxford (Clive, January 13th, “Nasa’s woman of influence” Space Politics, )
OSTP was a major player in the White House as the Vision for Space Exploration was being developed and its space policy team called on Dale every once in a while to act as a sounding board for their ideas. So was the opportunity to become deputy administrator at NASA a job she just couldn’t turn down? “When Mike Griffin called and asked me to join NASA as deputy administrator and help him to fulfil the Vision for Space Exploration, it came as a surprise and I had to think it through.” In the end it boiled down to a package deal with two elements that were now in place first, the Vision for Space Exploration itself and, second, a NASA administrator with the skills necessary to make the vision a reality.
If it doesn’t pass immediately it will be attached to an omnibus spending bill
Clemins 2011 - Director of the AAAS R&D; Budget and Policy Program (Patrick, March 24th, “The US Federal Budget Process and R&D Investment” )
Joint memorandum from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) lays out Presidential priorities and provides broad guidance. A i i λ Agencies negotiate with OMB over their budget proposals with OSTP serving an advisory role λ Budget proposals are finalized in January. President presents the proposed budget to Congress on the first Monday of February Appropriation committees write and approve appropriations bills λ Bills have to pass the full chamber by majority vote λ The different versions passed by both chambers are conferenced λ Each chamber then has to agree to the conference report before President can sign λ The fiscal year ends on Sept 30, any unfunded agency must shutdown unless a continuing resolution (CR) is passed λ Omnibus bill is created to pass remaining appropriations bills
Omnibus spending bills shield the link to politics – they are must-pass
Matthews, Lane, and Evans 2011– Matthews is Ph.D., is a fellow in science and technology policy at the Baker Institute, Lane has a Ph.D and is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor at Rice University and he is a Senior Fellow of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, where he is engaged in matters of science and technology policy, Evans is a Rice University graduate in physics (Kristin R.W., Neal, and Kenneth M., July 21st, “US Scientific Research and Development 202” )
Delayed budget approvals can cause severe problems for agencies, which usually must continue to work under the guidelines of their previous budgets and have no way of knowing when their budget will be approved or what it will look like. In order to avoid a chain of continuing resolutions, Congress will occasionally bundle the unresolved budget requests together as a single piece of legislation, known as an omnibus appropriations bill. Omnibus bills, which are becoming progressively more common, tend to contain a diverse set of unrelated legislative items. With specific regard to R&D funding, these last-resort bills provide a convenient platform for members of Congress, often with the encouragement of constituents (e.g., universities) to include earmarks.
Even if Congress says no, recommendations create political pressure that solves the case
OCALA 2/1/2010. “A Leadership Deficit,”
The next-best alternative would be for Congress to establish a commission with the authority to recommend increases in revenue and decreases in spending (or, at the least, decreases in the rate of increases in spending). Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire have already proposed just such a plan — with the caveat that Congress would be required to vote on the entire package of recommendations, without amendment. The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission would be a model for the budget commission. In 2005, the base-closure commission produced a cost-effective plan for closing unneeded bases, while preserving national security. Congress was required to vote, up or down, on the defense commission's recommendations; they were passed. Last week, a majority (53 senators) voted for the Conrad-Gregg proposal — including Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican George LeMieux, both of Florida. Unfortunately, the measure failed because a Senate rule requires 60 votes for approval. So, the task of formulating recommendations is being deferred to a presidential panel. Looking to history as a guide, a presidential commission on Social Security, convened in 1982-83, wasn't particularly effective. But the commission produced enough political consensus for a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and a Democratic Congress to provide leadership. They agreed to accept increases in payroll taxes and decreases in benefits — which combined to extend the life of Social Security for decades. The same sort of leadership — and recognition of the need to tackle deficits through revenues and expenditures — will be required for Obama's budget commission to produce a similar success.
Political pressure is more important than legislation – opposition to the plan means it is more likely to be rolled back
Christopher Beam, Slate Magazine, 7/14/2010. “Pelosi’s Paradox,” p. Lexis
Then again, if you think about it, Congress binds itself all the time. As University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner points out: "Congress can already bind the future in uncontroversial ways. It borrows money, compelling the future to repay or suffer a loss of credit. It starts wars, compelling the future to finish them. Everything Congress does affects future generations, for good or for ill." You might not be able to physically force a future Congress to cut costs. But you can pass laws and create political pressure to make it hard for them to wriggle out of something. In 2001, for example, Congress passed tax cuts with the explicit understanding that they would expire in 2010-that's what the law said. But there was an implicit understanding that it would be pretty hard for the Congress of 2010 to allow them to expire. Ultimately, the only way to ensure that a future Congress follows orders-whether it's to eliminate the deficit or to punish banks or to implement immigration reform-is the old-fashioned way: Political pressure. Whether that pressure comes from K Street lobbyists or grass-roots campaigns, its purpose is to persuade Congress that this cause still matters. Deficit reduction will only happen if future Congresses are as scared of the issue as the present Congress. (The reasoning could go something like this: I don't like these tax hikes, either, but we need to do something about the deficit, and, besides, I didn't write this law.) Congress may not be able to bind itself, but politics can.
Cp doesn’t require Congressional authorization – OSTP budget ALONE can force implementation
Cordis 2010 – research and innovation news source (March 16th, “Organizations” )
Congress established OSTP in 1976 with a broad mandate to advise the President and others within the Executive Office of the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The 1976 Act also authorizes OSTP to lead an interagency effort to develop and to implement sound science and technology policies and budgets and to work with the private sector, state and local governments, the science and higher education communities, and other nations toward this end. The organisation has not changed names and it has not merged with any other organisations over the years.
AT: can’t do space policy
OSTP is in charge of subcommittees that regulate space policy
National Space Studies Center 2005 (December 12th, “Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, )
The 1996 National Space Policy designates the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a Cabinet-level organization chaired by the President, as “the principal forum for resolving issues related to national space policy.” The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) coordinates Federal policies for science and technology. The Director of OSTP also serves as the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. In this role, he co-chairs the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and supports the NSTC. The policy directs that, “as appropriate, the NSTC and NSC [National Security Council] will co-chair policy processes.”
AT: perm do cp
1. severs certainty –
a. the counterplan has the OSTP recommend the plan – it doesn’t require implementation, making it distinct from the plan
Stine 2009 – Specialist in science and technology policy (Deborah D., June 3rd, “The President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Issues for Congress, )
In the third step, OMB worked with OSTP to review the proposed budgets to see if they reflected previously agreed upon plans and priorities. The OSTP also participated in OMB budget examiner presentations to the OMB Director and provided advice on priorities at that time. OSTP Director Marburger stated that the strongest feedback on Administration priorities occurs during budget preparation (step 2); however, the most direct feedback occurred when agencies are negotiating with OMB (step 3). These negotiations included the funding levels and the programs on which that funding was spent. In the fourth step, OSTP’s primary role in the budget process was to advise on the quality of the proposals and their relevance to the priorities that had been established. The ultimate choices, however, were made by the President, the OMB Director, and the Cabinet, according to Dr. Marburger.
b. Means the plan is not topical Resolved means “having a fixed purpose, resolute”
Websters Dictionary 96
2. severs immediacy –
a. recommendations have to undergo budget cycles
Clemins 2010 - Director for the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program (Patrick J., December 16th, “overview of federal research and development funding” )
Joint memorandum from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) lays out Presidential priorities ( Agencies deliver budget justifications to OMB ( President releases budget on the first Monday in February ( Congress approves budget resolution, the big-picture spending plan ( Appropriation committees write and approve 12 appropriations bills ( The fiscal year ends on Sept 30, any unfunded agency must shutdown unless a continuing resolution (CR) is passed
b. should means immediate
Justice Summer, Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant”, 1994,
4 The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should"13 in the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16 ¶5 Nisi prius orders should be so construed as to give effect to every words and every part of the text, with a view to carrying out the evident intent of the judge's direction.17 The order's language ought not to be considered abstractly. The actual meaning intended by the document's signatory should be derived from the context in which the phrase to be interpreted is used.18 When applied to the May 18 memorial, these told canons impel my conclusion that the judge doubtless intended his ruling as an in praesenti resolution of Dollarsaver's quest for judgment n.o.v. Approval of all counsel plainly appears on the face of the critical May 18 entry which is [885 P.2d 1358] signed by the judge.19 True minutes20 of a court neither call for nor bear the approval of the parties' counsel nor the judge's signature. To reject out of hand the view that in this context "should" is impliedly followed by the customary, "and the same hereby is", makes the court once again revert to medieval notions of ritualistic formalism now so thoroughly condemned in national jurisprudence and long abandoned by the statutory policy of this State. [Continues – To Footnote] 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase denotes that which in law is presently or immediately effective, as opposed to something that will or would become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).
3. Severance is a voting issue for fairness and education – destroys negative strategy, argumentative responsibility, good plan writing, and justifies aff conditionality
AT: perm do both
Links to politics – “should” requires immediate action, meaning the plan happens before the counterplan and Obama/Congress don’t get political cover – sequencing matters
AT: counterplan illegit
Counter interpretation – the neg can run 1 recommend CP specific to the topic with a solvency advocate – this is best:
1. Tests the plan – affs should have to defend immediate implementation; this leads to better plan and advantage writing
2. Key to neg ground – process CPs check new affs and are key to clash early in the year
3. Process CPs uniquely educational – teach decision making and fosters knowledge about how the government works
4. No ground loss – the aff can argue say no, delay, or read DAs to adding new recommendations
5. Err neg on theory – aff speaks first and last, chooses the area of the debate, and has infinite prep
6. Reject the argument, not the team
**Aff
No solvency
OSTP lacks enough funding to make effective recommendations
Stine 2009 – Specialist in science and technology policy (Deborah D., June 3rd, “The President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Issues for Congress, )
The ability of OSTP to undertake the actions requested of it depends on both its budget and staff. Figure 3 and Figure 4, presented earlier, provide OSTP’s historical budget and staffing. Some reports developed by the S&T community express their concern that OSTP needs to have more civil service professional staff and a higher budget.55 Such staff, they say, would maintain institutional knowledge and have a solid understanding of the government operations. As a result, these staff members could enhance support to political appointees. These reports assert that this change would make OSTP staff similar to other EOP expert staff, such as those employed at OMB.56 Additional funding, these reports state, would provide OSTP with sufficient staff and the ability to conduct special analyses on emerging issues. Bush Administration OSTP staff contended that sufficient long-term scientific and technical staff to respond to the President’s scientific and technical information and analysis needs was available at OSTP and at federal agencies. They believed, for example, that OSTP staff was sufficient even when staffing is generally at its lowest point during Presidential transitions.57 Should Congress wish to enhance the funding and staffing of OSTP, it can do so through the appropriations process. Congress provided $5.2 million for OSTP in FY2008, less than the President’s request of $5.5 million.58 For FY2009, the President’s budget requests $5.3 million for OSTP.59 Congress may wish to maintain the current situation, or it might wish to increase the number of OSTP civil service staff; specify the number of Associate Directors; designate the policy issue focus of the Associate Directors; or require that OSTP play a greater role in the activities of other EOP agencies, such as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), National Economic Council (NEC), Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), Domestic Policy Council (DPC), Homeland Security Council (HSC), and National Security Council (NSC). Should Congress wish to increase the number of OSTP civil service staff while maintaining OSTP’s current budget, it might wish to examine the utility of OSTP’s FFRDC, the Science and Technology Policy Institute. In FY2008, Congress appropriated $2.2 million for STPI—almost half the funding for the remainder of OSTP’s activities.60 Therefore, OSTP’s FY2008 budget would be over $7 million if the two funds were combined. On the other hand, OSTP may need the short-term analysis of scientific and technical information STPI provides.
AT: no congressional authorization
OSTP must testify in front of Congress
Stine 2009 – Specialist in science and technology policy (Deborah D., June 3rd, “The President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Issues for Congress, )
In addition, the act establishes the position of the OSTP director. According to the act, “The primary function of the OSTP Director is to provide, within the Executive Office of the President, advice on the scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of issues that require attention at the highest level of Government.” Unlike the heads of some other EOP agencies, the OSTP Director testifies before congressional committees, even though the office provides advice and assistance to the White House.
Links to politics
CP links to politics – Congress is pissed at the OSTP for engaging China, budget cut proves
Mervis 2011– science writer (Jeffrey, July 12th, “House Spending Panel pushes OSTP over links to China” )
Bad things can happen to federal agencies when they cross swords with their budget overlords in Congress. The latest example of that political adage comes in the 2012 spending plan for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) unveiled today by the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. It cuts OSTP's budget by 55%, from the current $6.65 million to $3 million. And the subcommittee that made the recommendation, chaired by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), doesn't hide the fact that the reduction is payback for the office's response to language Wolf inserted in this year's spending bill passed in April that was aimed at restricting U.S. relations with China. "OSTP has chosen to disregard a strong and unambiguous legislative prohibition on bilateral engagement with China or Chinese-owned companies," says language accompanying the 2012 bill, to be voted on tomorrow by the full appropriations committee. "OSTP's behavior demonstrates a lack of respect for the policy and oversight roles of the Congress." Asked for his reaction to the committee's move, a spokesperson for OSTP director and presidential science advisor John Holdren repeated the Obama Administration's position that "it is OSTP's intention to live within the terms of the appropriations prohibition insofar as doing so is consistent with his responsibilities for executing the President's constitutional authority in foreign relations." Holdren had previously told Wolf that he would examine each proposed U.S.-Chinese interaction "on a case by case basis." OSTP's 2012 request is 5% below what the office received in 2010. And a spokesperson for Holdren noted that the current spending bill "is the first of many steps in a budget process that will play out over the course of the next several months." That is, the 2012 budget won't be final until the House and Senate agree on a version that is also acceptable to the president. The House panel also has some advice for how OSTP should spend its diminished resources. Although Holdren has a staff of 34 that operate programs in science, technology, environment, and national security/international affairs, the legislators said that his office should devote its 2012 appropriations to improving U.S. science and math education. That effort includes finding better ways to share with local schools the results of federally funded research on so-called best practices. "The Committee expects that OSTP will take all necessary steps to integrate dissemination goals and policies into its STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education strategic plan."
1NC Democratic Engagement CP
SAMPLE TEXT: USFG should implement programs to increase the number of Americans who perceive that they have a vested economic in the result of the plan.
SAMPLE TEXT: USFG should implement a referendum over the plan mandates.
NASA’s policies are shaped by a system that structurally excludes the American public, and the CP is key to solve.
Connell 7. (Kathleen M., Principal, The Connell Whittaker Group, LLC, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Future of Democracy and Space: Increased Democratization of Governmental Decision Making.” Presented September 20, 2007 as part of a session entitled "Astrosociology I: Theory and Research" at the AIAA Space 2007 conference in Long Beach, CA. . ps)
[Abstract]. NASA’s lack of a direct constituency among voters creates a structural issue that constrains budgets and options for civil space. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, trends have emerged that may alter how space policy is created. The future of space policy may well evolve into a more open system, thus impacting NASA’s budget and programs. Mass collaboration, IT tools and Web 2.0 have empowered individuals. Space entrepreneurs are likely to create a new class of space consumers. Space assets are on the critical path of global warming. Taken together, these trends promise to involve the global and national public more directly, and more often, in space policy choices.
I. NASA’s Structural Political Position: The Absence of a Major Direct Constituency Base
NASA, for all of its visibility and iconic meaning to society, does not possess a large direct constituency base in the American population. It is unlike other well-known and well-funded government and quasi-government programs and agencies, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Veterans Administration, the Small Business Administration, Medicare, The Department of Education, The U.S. Postal Service or the Department of Defense. These and other federal entities provide direct economic payouts, subsidies, loans, benefits, services and goods to individual Americans, their families and communities. These Americans, in turn, are political constituents, and delivering direct economic and social benefits to a constituent base is crucial to election and reelection bids of elected officials.
For this reason, NASA’s budget and priorities seem destined to be circumscribed and set by a small group of space policy actors. For better or worse, NASA is generally not impacted by the massive membership lobbies that are engaged in the business of steering benefits to their members via legislation. These organizations, along with Political Action Committees, hold the leverage of constituent votes and campaign funds for elected officials within their grasp.
A case in point is the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which has a membership of 38 million members and a large lobbying budget. It is a major player in Medicare and the health industry in general.
Likewise, veterans represent approximately 27 million taxpayers and their families. In contrast, AIAA, the largest aerospace professional society in the U.S., claims 31,000 enrolled members. From this perspective, it is easy to understand why structural issues in our representative democracy continue to contain the small budget wedge of the largely popular civil space program, and are likely to do so in the future.
Further, if perception is reality in politics, not since the Cold War have Americans perceived unquestionable benefit from NASA. Most of the American voters have been either structurally excluded, or have not been incentivised since the Apollo era, to engage in space policy when budget season rolls around each year. How then, will public space investment meet its needs in competition with other domestic and foreign priorities?
A related question is, how can NASA build a new, crewed spacecraft capable of lunar exploration, as well as maintain its portfolio of space science and other activities within its current budget? These questions and debates now consume the space community, NASA Administrators, Congress and space supporters alike.
To answer these questions from a structural perspective means that a “perfect storm” of new trends must emerge. These trends might include:
- An increase in the number of voters who have a direct interest in space expenditures;
- The emergence of another national space emergency to drive up the space budget;
- More engagement from public in space policy budget advocacy choices via volunteerism;
- Discovery of additional capital infusions for space projects from other sources.
The following discussion briefly outlines how these emergent structural changes can be viewed.
Status quo space policies are influenced by a handful of major players- however, modernization is creating new constituencies for space that aren’t represented.
Connell 7. (Kathleen M., Principal, The Connell Whittaker Group, LLC, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Future of Democracy and Space: Increased Democratization of Governmental Decision Making.” Presented September 20, 2007 as part of a session entitled "Astrosociology I: Theory and Research" at the AIAA Space 2007 conference in Long Beach, CA. . ps)
NASA policies are proposed by each Administration, and disposed of by Congressional legislation. Beneath this super structure for decision-making in space policy is a traditional set of players and intermediatiries with direct interest in the policy and budget outcomes at NASA. These historic space players are generally understood to align in the categories of industry, academia, technical associations and the military. Rarely discussed, but equally important, is the role of unions, which represent a key percentage of the public and private sector space workforce.
In addition, it is sometimes argued that large aerospace Political Action Committees (PAC) are ghost drivers of space policy. While the private sector is unquestionably influential, facts and outcomes would suggest that it does not hold dominion in space matters. The evidence for this is that NASA’s budget has climbed only incrementally over time. Second, the top all-time PAC contributors to office holders show aerospace firms are 35th on the list, well below unions, realtors, bankers, brewers and Microsoft.
More interesting is the very large budget impact of very local space worker constituents, and their power in the traditional space states of Texas, Florida, Alabama Maryland and California. For purposes of this discussion, it is assumed that the very localized, regional space states—home to NASA Centers and jobs—drive many major budget decisions at NASA and in Congress today. These locales are a very small percentage of the American political base, but a historically powerful one. That power is about to be shared with a new class of space consumers, created by space entrepreneurship.
This author also contends that American voters, even those who do not live next door to a NASA center, are about to be transformed into relatively more empowered space consumers. The means for this is the privatization of space travel, and the increasing need and consumption of critical goods and services from space assets. The requirements of investment dictate that this must be so, for investment requires customers in order to generate a return. Individuals and blocks of consumers are now poised to be customers for many commercial space firms.
The rise of the consumer and consumer movements in America is well documented in every industrial sector, but only recently has migrated to the space sector. With consumption comes choice. Soon, space consumers may be “voting” with their discretionary income on space services and goods, registering stockholder initiatives, and applying pressure on firms via government regulation. The much-anticipated arrival of space consumers on the private space scene is not yet a fact, but their potential impact is worth noting now.
CP solves- technology creates the potential for hives of interested citizens to engage in currently expert-dominated space discourse.
Connell 7. (Kathleen M., Principal, The Connell Whittaker Group, LLC, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Future of Democracy and Space: Increased Democratization of Governmental Decision Making.” Presented September 20, 2007 as part of a session entitled "Astrosociology I: Theory and Research" at the AIAA Space 2007 conference in Long Beach, CA. . ps)
Twenty-first century space policy is also being dramatically influenced in a direct manner by technology. Social IT tools now enable fundraising, blogging, advocacy, instant information, texting, Web 2.0 sharing, meet-ups, friends, community building and instant advocacy. To confirm this, anyone can open Google and type American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the search term “space exploration” and the search engine will return 71 million hits. Many, if not most, are independent “netizens,” who are creating new information, or passing on official space media releases with editorial comments.
This “Army of Davids” is inconceivable to those accustomed to the institutional Goliath language of space discourse, where, only a few years ago, senior experts were the only voices heard. Equally interesting is, not only the quantity of space opinion and political action on the web, but also the quality of the public information publicly. “Billions and Billions” (to borrow a well-known quote from Carl Sagan) no longer refers just to the firmament of stars, but also to the number of global citizens now in the know, and talking online 24/7, about all manner of space subjects.
Savvy activists and organizers are using these virtual tools, and more sophisticated advocacy IT platforms, to create communities that mobilize new publics, interest groups, space “prosumers,” beleaguered space scientists with dwindling budgets, and others. Several thousand of these interested parties and organizations have been cataloged in informal databases and in a Directory of Space Actors.
The list of active space networks represents official organizations, industry lobbies, professional societies, informal societies, bloggers, affiliative networks, state-based organizations, consultants, researchers, and media. What it does not fully capture is a profusion of subniche players with enormous reach. Recently, the smaller organizations have begun uniting in big-tent coalitions, as is common in grassroots movements since the beginning of modern society and social movements.
In 1994, Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, captured this phenomena in the notion of “hives,” where independent agents spontaneously form to meet group objectives. Kelly viewed this trend as a neo-biological social and economic development. Both lead and leaderless hives of concerns parties can now be mobilized in short order to make major impacts on space budgets, and to provide highly competent input into the space policy process. Added to this is the evolution of gaming to simulation, as Second Life and other quasi-virtual environments allow for a simulated high-definition space experience for anyone with an adequate computer. These tools are evolvable, and most importantly, free or very low cost.
In political terms, interested persons can now “opt-in” to the space policy debate, click and send their opinion and requests to elected officials and the media, and host meet-ups in Congressional offices with their representatives. Many more are choosing to do so in increasing numbers. As theorists and practitioners in space policy know, the impact on official legislation and Administration policy is already happening.
The structural shift that these technologies allow has already changed political strategy from a closed system to a more open process, in the very campaigns of the electeds who will go to Washington to decide space and other budget matters. Technology has also become personal, and reflecting this, a participatory space movement aligns itself with private space investments. A space leader articulated the change during a recent interview: “the shift is from watching others go into space, to ‘I want to go.’”
As a result, independent and hive space actors are no longer relegated to a marginal status in decision making about space exploration and utilization of space assets for the public good and goods.
As heady as these trends have become, in terms of current space policy, in a representative democracy the general public is still largely kept unaware of the specialist discussions of policy. The myth of “rocket science” still discourages most citizens from being enfranchised with regard to the space sphere.
The fear of anarchy may rouse many orderly space engineers to dread this smorgasbord of public engagement. However, given the web and other forms of interaction, there is less reason to doubt that, sooner rather than later, space will be demystified for the general public once and for all. It is clear that a solid plank has been thrown across the moat that once separated the “wiki” community from the rocket community. Transit and conversation into each other’s domains has begun and will continue in a free society.
Space policy is structurally undemocratic- but there is potential to change the process- multiple factors make this possible.
Connell 7. (Kathleen M., Principal, The Connell Whittaker Group, LLC, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Future of Democracy and Space: Increased Democratization of Governmental Decision Making.” Presented September 20, 2007 as part of a session entitled "Astrosociology I: Theory and Research" at the AIAA Space 2007 conference in Long Beach, CA. . ps)
V. Conclusion
Taken as whole, these observations about possible future outcomes and space policy scenarios are timely, given the increasing relevance of space activities, climate change, space-based energy and economic development. The structural issues that drive space policy are still in place, but giving way to a new wave of democracy-seeking trends. This indicates that change is underway in democratic institutions. The old citadel of space policy is evolving to include a commonwealth of highly-motivated and empowered players. The opportunity exists to further understand the intersections of public will, policy, interactive technology, space commercialization and global warming, as these issues move to center stage in the policy process.
Finally, it is important to note, that social science research, including public policy and astrosociology, provides an intellectual meeting place in the space community (Pass 2004a, 2004b), where these societal issues can and must be researched and discussed. The development of the long-ignored social sciences as a single, inter-American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics disciplinary field will allow collaboration among colleagues in a more organized manner, and will allow for the development of a single, easily-recognizable and accessible body of knowledge for both scholars and practioners.
Those who elect to become applied astrosociologists will be able to act with increased competence and assure that timely action is taken to address the challenges and opportunities before us all.
**Aff – democratic engagement
Perm: Pass the plan and have a referendum over the plan – The plan will be implemented regardless – the referendum would be advisory which still solves all your democracy arguments – the net benefit is solvency and our disads to the CP
Hoekstra in ‘94
(Pete, US Rep for Michigan, “Nationwide Initiative and Referendum: on Reforming Congress”, July 14, )
Specifically what Citizens Against Government Waste has been talking about, they have been talking about the proposal here in Washington that I have introduced to allow a nationwide advisory referendum on term limits, the balanced budget amendment, and the line-item veto in the November elections of 1994 so that the American people can let their feelings on these issues be known to this Congress. They believe that term limits will change politics. People will have a direct link with Washington, and they believe, Citizens Against Government Waste believe that this advisory referendum process will give Americans the opportunity that they should have, which is an opportunity to have a voice on what the agenda is here in Washington. The Heritage Foundation in their policy review have published an article that talks about breaking the congressional lock grip, the case for a national referendum ; it talks about the problem. What is the problem? The problem is that there is a crisis of confidence in National Government, one that threatens to permanently cripple our republican democracy. That is the problem. We have a serious trust deficit between the American people and this institution in Washington. Perhaps the best way to restore confidence in the political process is to rebuild the connection between national elections and national issues. We need a new constitutional device that lets voters help set the Nation's agenda. I propose, through a process of indirect initiatives and elections, voters should be allowed to instruct Congress about Government priorities and goals. We are not talking in this article about pure democracy, but we are talking about, again, an opportunity for the citizens of this country to help set the agenda in Washington. It is something, a change, that we do not take lightly. James Madison believed a republican form of government would refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary and partial considerations. Madison is usually considered one of the more level-headed of the Founders, and his critique of direct democracy is sound and broadly admired. His optimism, however, and think about the words used there. Think about how often the American people are describing this body in using these terms: the deliberative body, about the wisdom, the patriotism, the love of justice of elected representatives now seems naive and anachronistic. The brakes against mob rule written by and into the Constitution should not be lightly dismissed. There are, on the other hand, a number of constitutional changes that promote the democratic impulse. These include a wide suffrage, short election terms for House Members, so what we are saying here is the process of becoming a more open government is not inconsistent with what the Founding Fathers envisioned and where they thought this country might move to. But what are some of the other criticisms of this initiative and referendum? What are some of the problems that many of you have, or have expressed to me, about why letting the voters into the process just will not work? Criticisms that I hear, the first criticism is direct lawmaking by the people may undermine the legitimacy of elected government by taking power away from elected representatives. But I believe that in many cases we are already losing this legitimacy because we are not responding to the agenda that the American people have set for us. Another argument against initiatives is that they encourage legislative inertia, that the legislative will wait for the public to act on controversial matters to avoid blame. I believe many people in America today would describe that situation as exactly what is happening in Congress today. We are not dealing with the tough issues. What do other critics say? They say that initiatives are potentially the tools of special-interest groups. I think many people in the country today would say that the way this Congress works today is the result, or the decisions we make or that we have become a creature of special-interest groups. Let us open up the process and let the American people into the process. Some other critics contend that a national initiative destroys federalism and its important protections for States and regions. We are already destroying federalism by the actions we are taking here with Federal mandates, the shrinking power of the 10th amendment, the supermajority requirements; and legislative review of proposals limit the possibilities. But the thing, the process, is we are already implementing and mandating to the States. And, finally, critics of the initiative process say that proponents have undue faith in the masses and a lack of respect for the elected elites. I will have to say that that is absolutely true. Admittedly, I have a lot more confidence in the masses, in the American people's ability to understand the issues and the pressures that are facing this country; I believe that they could provide a powerful insight into the types of decisions and the direction that we should be setting for this country. The initiative and referendum process: What are some of the many benefits other than helping set the right agenda? It will help stimulate the voters. Turnouts for elections in this country are dismal, and in a Presidential election we get excited when 55 percent of the voters decide to participate in the election. In a non-presidential election year, the turnout may go down to 40 percent. We need a process that is going to get voters back involved in the election process. I think initiative and referendum will help stimulate voters to become more active in the process. And what else might initiative and referendum do? They will end, I believe, business as usual. After being here for 18 months, if there is anything more important for this Congress, we need to end business as usual. As with any major reform, national indirect initiatives and referendum will disrupt comfortable relationships and break up cozy alliances. It may well mean the end of business as usual in Washington, DC. But business as usual is not what this Nation needs or what the voters want. Indirect initiative process will help restore the Democratic nature of our Republican institution before growing public frustration brings even greater alienation or a stampede to more radical measures of change. I think the Heritage Foundation has done us a great service. I will send this out in a `Dear Colleague,' this article about breaking the congressional lock grip, the case for a national referendum. What else is going on at the grassroots? There is an intellectual argument for changing the process. But also, United We Stand, United We Stand America started a national petition drive so voters in every congressional district can let you know how they feel about the opportunity to vote on term limits, to vote on a balanced Federal budget and vote on a true presidential line item veto. They are gathering signatures around the country right now which they are going to be sending to you to encourage you to sign a discharge petition which will bring this bill to the floor and allow us to vote to change the process and then allow the American people to vote on those issues this fall. Let us talk specifically about the different kinds of ways that I have seen that we can use initiative and referendum here in Washington and around the country. I talked about House Resolution 3835, which would allow a national advisory referendum on term limits. We now have House Resolution 409, which seeks to discharge that bill that was filed by Congressman Jim Inhofe. The rule would allow us to add to that bill an advisory referendum on a balanced budget and a line item veto. So that is one way that we can use initiative and referendum, that we can use it to get an advisory in a nonbinding format, the opinion of the American people on some critical issues that we want their input on. It is more than a poll, it is a debate on these issues before the vote takes place. Think of our role in an advisory referendum, as Members of Congress, to understand the issues, to then debate, to information and educate the American people about the positives, the negatives of these advisory referendums, worthy educators, worthy informers. The American people then would have the opportunity to express their opinion to us at the polls in November. The advisory referendum , this is again published by the American Political Report, the advisory referendum , you take what is happening with term limits and imagine what we are doing, moving the issue from Washington. We think we are moving it to the American people, but really where has the issue on term limits gone? Moreover, the advisory referendum, if implemented, would effectively preempt a court decision and keep the debate political rather than judicial. Why do we say that? Because term limits with, all the States that have passed term limits for Congressmen, they are now being challenged in the courts. The issue of term limits is not now a political decision. We are giving away our responsibility for taking the lead and deciding that issue, and the decision is going to be made by the courts. That is wrong. Congress should take the responsibility for dealing with these issues.
The CP can’t solve
a. Unconstitutional – the court would strike it down
Schmidt et al in '5
(Steffen, Prof Pol Sci @ Iowa State, Barbara Bardes, Prof Pol Sci @ Cincinnati and Mack Shelley, Prof Pol Sci @ Iowa State, "American Government and Politics, 2005-2006, p. 2, Google Print)
As a practical matter, the U.S. Constitution makes no provision for referenda, initiatives, or recalls. It also does not ban such procedures. The United States Supreme Court, however, has strongly opposed any delegation of the congressional power to draft legislation. Some years ago, for example, congress passed a "line-item veto" law that allowed the president to block part of a spending bill without rejecting the entire package. The Supreme Court found this law to be an unconstitutional delegation of congressional power. The membership and opinions of the Court can change, but the existing Court would surely never permit a binding national referendum. Of course, Congress could always sponsor a purely advisory referendum, it is unlikely that the Court would block such a procedure, as long as Congress retained the right to accept or to ignore the results of the vote.
b. Referenda are inherently conservative – they will default to the status-quo
Haskell in ‘1
(John, Senior Fellow @ Government Affairs Institute, “Direct Democracy or Representative Government?” p. 104)
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that the initiative process is a fairly conservative policy-making instrument. Voters have regularly demonstrated that they are not dupes. They seem inclined to vote no as opposed to taking a leap into the unknown. When voters are confused as to the meaning of a proposition, either because of their lack of research or through efforts to write the proposal in a confusing way, they tend to oppose it. In addition, money spent in opposition to initiatives has far more impact than money spent in favor of them. In short, the status quo is often preserved, either because groups are adept at finding attack points in propositions and wage sophisticated campaigns to oppose them, or because they are able to develop clever counterproposals and get those on the ballot. These proposals often include so-called "kill clauses," which provide that the proposition on a similar topic that gets the most votes will take precedence if both or all receive majority support.
c. Voters in inept – even if they wanted the plan they would vote against it
Haskell in ‘1
(John, Senior Fellow @ Government Affairs Institute, “Direct Democracy or Representative Government?” p. 100)
David Magleby, a scholar of direct democracy has devoted a great deal of attention to the question of the fitness of voters.33 He has found evidence of a variety of problems with having voters decide ballot measures. For one thing, voters often have only one source of information when they vote on referenda and initiatives: television. This unwillingness to take advantage of the many other available sources of information casts doubt as to whether voters are prepared to decide complex questions. Magleby has also found evidence that in some initiative and referendum campaigns many voters are so woefully ignorant that they have difficulty translating their views into votes. In other words, many people cast votes that are inconsistent with their ideological predispositions because of their confusion concerning the matter in question—thus, they may actually vote against their views and wishes. In fact, many of the official explanations of issues that are distributed by the states are written at a level—often a college reading level—that is beyond the comprehension of many voters.
prolif turn
Referenda snowball – use on one issue would lead to use on everything
Haskell in ‘1
(John, Senior Fellow @ Government Affairs Institute, “Direct Democracy or Representative Government?” p. 75-76
But the advent of national referenda would be a big step. The reform party and many mainstream politicians have proposed the limited use of national referenda for specific issues—maybe just for a citizen veto of certain types of legislation, such as tax increases. Such an idea is widely popular, and, although there is tremendous institutional resistance to it, its advent is far from out of the question. If that barrier were to be crossed, it is hard to imagine that active citizens and groups would be satisfied with restricting the use of the process to a few issues.
Public hates nonproliferation efforts
Miles Pomper, Senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, NTI Global Security Newswire June 21, 2009, p.
Pomper said that while he is surprised that Obama has put nuclear nonproliferation at the top of his administration's agenda, that does not ensure success. Nuclear nonproliferation "is an elite issue. There's very little popular support. If you look at the polling on the whole, the U.S. public does not want to get rid nuclear weapons," he said, without citing a specific opinion poll. "It's very skeptical of the approach. If there's resonance in the public it's about the issue of nuclear terrorism." Given the issues facing the country, such as health care reform and the continuing economic downturn, it is unclear how much political capital the president will want to spend on nonproliferation, Pomper said.
Proliferation dramatically increases the risk of accidental, preemptive and terrorist based nuclear war – mass slaughter of entire nations is likely
Utgoff in ‘2
(Victor, Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses and former Senior Member of the National security Council Staff, Survival, “Proliferation, Missile Defense and American Ambitions”, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer, p. 87-90)
Many readers are probably willing to accept that nuclear proliferation is such a grave threat to world peace that every effort should be made to avoid it. However, every effort has not been made in the past, and we are talking about much more substantial efforts now. For new and substantially more burdensome efforts to be made to slow or stop nuclear proliferation, it needs to be established that the highly proliferated nuclear world that would sooner or later evolve without such efforts is not going to be acceptable. And, for many reasons, it is not. First, the dynamics of getting to a highly proliferated world could be very dangerous. Proliferating states will feel great pressures to obtain nuclear weapons and delivery systems before any potential opponent does. Those who succeed in outracing an opponent may consider preemptive nuclear war before the opponent becomes capable of nuclear retaliation. Those who lag behind might try to preempt their opponent’s nuclear programme or defeat the opponent using conventional forces. And those who feel threatened but are incapable of building nuclear weapons may still be able to join in this arms race by building other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological weapons. Second, as the world approaches complete proliferation, the hazards posed by nuclear weapons today will be magnified many times over. Fifty or more nations capable of launching nuclear weapons means that the risk of nuclear accidents that could cause serious damage not only to their own populations and environments, but those of others, is hugely increased. The chances of such weapons falling into the hands of renegade military units or terrorists is far greater, as is the number of nations carrying out hazardous manufacturing and storage activities. Increased prospects for the occasional nuclear shootout Worse still, in a highly proliferated world there would be more frequent opportunities for the use of nuclear weapons. And more frequent opportunities means shorter expected times between conflicts in which nuclear weapons get used, unless the probability of use at any opportunity is actually zero. To be sure, some theorists on nuclear deterrence appear to think that in any confrontation between two states known to have reliable nuclear capabilities, the probability of nuclear weapons being used is zero.3 These theorists think that such states will be so fearful of escalation to nuclear war that they would always avoid or terminate confrontations between them, short of even conventional war. They believe this to be true even if the two states have different cultures or leaders with very eccentric personalities. History and human nature, however, suggest that they are almost surely wrong. History includes instances in which states known to possess nuclear weapons did engage in direct conventional conflict. China and Russia fought battles along their common border even after both had nuclear weapons. Moreover, logic suggests that if states with nuclear weapons always avoided conflict with one another, surely states without nuclear weapons would avoid conflict with states that had them. Again, history provides counter-examples. Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 even though it saw Israel as a nuclear power at the time. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and fought Britain’s efforts to take them back, even though Britain had nuclear weapons. Those who claim that two states with reliable nuclear capabilities to devastate each other will not engage in conventional conflict risking nuclear war also assume that any leader from any culture would not choose suicide for his nation. But history provides unhappy examples of states whose leaders were ready to choose suicide for themselves and their fellow citizens. Hitler tried to impose a ‘victory or destruction’ policy on his people as Nazi Germany was going down to defeat.4 And Japan’s war minister, during debates on how to respond to the American atomic bombing, suggested ‘Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?’5 If leaders are willing to engage in conflict with nuclear-armed nations, use of nuclear weapons in any particular instance may not be likely, but its probability would still be dangerously significant. In particular, human nature suggests that the threat of retaliation with nuclear weapons is not a reliable guarantee against a disastrous first use of these weapons. While national leaders and their advisors everywhere are usually talented and experienced people, even their most important decisions cannot be counted on to be the product of well-informed and thorough assessments of all options from all relevant points of view. This is especially so when the stakes are so large as to defy assessment and there are substantial pressures to act quickly, as could be expected in intense and fast-moving crises between nuclear-armed states.6 Instead, like other human beings, national leaders can be seduced by wishful thinking. They can misinterpret the words or actions of opposing leaders. Their advisors may produce answers that they think the leader wants to hear, or coalesce around what they know is an inferior decision because the group urgently needs the confidence or the sharing of responsibility that results from settling on something. Moreover, leaders may not recognise clearly where their personal or party interests diverge from those of their citizens. Under great stress, human beings can lose their ability to think carefully. They can refuse to believe that the worst could really happen, oversimplify the problem at hand, think in terms of simplistic analogies and play hunches. The intuitive rules for how individuals should respond to insults or signs of weakness in an opponent may too readily suggest a rash course of action. Anger, fear, greed, ambition and pride can all lead to bad decisions. The desire for a decisive solution to the problem at hand may lead to an unnecessarily extreme course of action. We can almost hear the kinds of words that could flow from discussions in nuclear crises or war. ‘These people are not willing to die for this interest’. ‘No sane person would actually use such weapons’. ‘Perhaps the opponent will back down if we show him we mean business by demonstrating a willingness to use nuclear weapons’. ‘If I don’t hit them back really hard, I am going to be driven from office, if not killed’. Whether right or wrong, in the stressful atmosphere of a nuclear crisis or war, such words from others, or silently from within, might resonate too readily with a harried leader. Thus, both history and human nature suggest that nuclear deterrence can be expected to fail from time to time, and we are fortunate it has not happened yet. But the threat of nuclear war is not just a matter of a few weapons being used. It could get much worse. Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressures to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.7 Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other’s cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and armoured attacks on the other. Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants beforehand.8 Intense and blinding anger is a common response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear ‘six-shooters’ on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.
1NC Doctrinology
SAMPLE TEXT: The USFG should base current and future decisions to develop and deploy X [e.g. kinetic kill vehicles] on evolving military, geopolitical and technological environments and capabilities and should further adopt a systematic doctrinal methodology for assessing and implementing the viability of X on an ongoing basis.
Or
The United States should adopt a systematic methodology for the continuous development of official doctrine of __________ in relation to historical military experience, innovation in new technologies and the emergence of new threats.
ONLY a dynamic open-doctrine approach to policy-making capable of learning lessons from experience and integrating new strategic concepts can allow the plan to become adaptive to new scenarios and facilitate effective force structure. ONLY the counterplan allows for the “restricted” mission to be an effective war-fighting instrument post-plan by developing a dynamic framework approach RATHER THAN any ‘durable’ eternal mandate
Temple ’92 Lt Col L. Parker Temple III, (USAF, Retired (USAFA; MBA, University of Northern Colorado; MS, West Coast University), is a private consultant on space policy and programs. “Of Machine Guns, Yellow Brick Roads, and Doctrine” Airpower Journal, Summer SW)
We now have the end objective in sight. The incorporation of frameworks as described here will both help us write better doctrine and, just as importantly, help us interpret whatever history we read to determine its usefulness for ourselves. Unfortunately, we do not now have a doctrine that is developed according to the framework approach. The current draft of AFM 1-1 has taken a giant step forward by incorporating historical examples and vignettes, as many of us have encouraged in the past.19 Frameworks offer the only valid method for doctrine development. Each new war does not necessarily improve our ability to wage war successfully. Korea and Vietnam were not improvements on our success in World War II. Whether they could have been is moot; they were not because doctrine had not adequately accounted for the increased political dimension of the latter wars. Lessons learned in wars do not move inexorably toward perfect understanding. Methodologies that cause us to believe we will eventually achieve perfect principles of war are dangerous. Each war has elements from previous wars, but in an essentially new framework. Unless doctrine is dynamic enough to recognize changes in frameworks, it will not enhance our chances of success. Writing successful doctrine requires recognizing, judging, and describing how the Air Force operates in such a way that we can observe and assess the changes as frameworks evolve and come into contact with other frameworks. The Air Force's frameworks were modified by the development and fielding of stealth technology in both Tactical Air Command (TAC) and Strategic Air Command (SAC); it also necessitated modification of the framework of anyone who might be an enemy, since they would have to try to counter stealth. In this case, we are forcing the rest of the world to react to a revolutionary new technology. As we force others to adapt to our new framework, we cannot wait and adapt to their changing frameworks. We must stay intensely aware of the status of the frameworks of potential enemies as an important aspect of professional military education. Without this, there would be little hope for recognizing the areas where doctrine would help exploit weaknesses in the adversary and where the adversary might exploit our own weaknesses. Doctrine must be at once historical and futuristic. It must be historical to understand how the framework came to be what it is. Once we understand why it has become what it is, we will be able to understand what elements of the framework will need to be changed in order for us to meet the future, to stay ahead of technology, or to change aspects of the present framework that we do not like. Suppose we object to the size and weight of present military satellites and believe we should spend resources to develop lightsats instead. Before rushing ahead, we should be able to find in an adequate space doctrine just how we came to have such large satellites--and we should do this in terms clear enough to understand what is required to reduce their size and what is lost in downsizing without adversely affecting other aspects of the Air Force's space business. An adequate doctrine would also allow us to judge if smaller satellites are even a good idea once we understand the subject. Operation Desert Storm provides an excellent example for doctrinal framework evaluation. The doctrinal frameworks we might compare it to are the Vietnam War and the North African campaign in World War II. Both have common elements to carry forward into the framework for Desert Storm. Some of the same problems faced Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Bernard Montgomery (heat, water shortages, and sand). But I submit that what we actually saw was the crossing of a significant framework boundary. Although it will take more serious thinking, judgment indicates the new framework must be built on the basis of the three key elements of precision guided munitions, the vast flow of information (public, private, and military), and the tight integration of all US and allied forces. Precision guided munitions were not new to Desert Storm; however, never before had they been used in such numbers (many times the total number used in the entire Vietnam War), with such intensity (a few months versus years for the Vietnam War) and with such devastating effects. Precision guided munitions hold the potential to be Sir George Milne's machine guns of the latter half of the twentieth century in terms of doctrinal impact. No war in history ever had so much information flowing. It will take some time to comprehend the impact of the vast amount of information from mass media, from command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) systems in the military, and from other sources and to fold them into doctrine. However, the information revolution of Desert Storm is just as important doctrinally as the precision guided munitions within the new framework. The integration of forces was also a key to success. It was truly a showpiece for aerial warfare, but it took the synergism of land, sea, air, and space forces to prosecute the war with such overwhelming effect on the enemy. The use of frameworks would also cause us to examine other aspects of the war. Before we claim the decisiveness of air power, we ought to realize that the symmetry of numbers was not evident in the tactics, resources used, technology, training, and in virtually every metric we could apply. The coalition fought a lopsided war because it took advantage of the three key elements enumerated and because the Iraqis could not. The use of precision guided munitions and the information to employ them being readily available were a major asymmetry in Desert Storm. Judgment indicates that before we derive a doctrine that asserts the ascendancy of air power (as Billy Mitchell and Giulio Douhet would have had us do 60 years ago), we must understand Desert Storm in terms of its framework. Frameworks will allow us to build doctrine that helps us anticipate the changes in war before they occur by interpreting our enemy's altering frameworks rather than waiting and adapting afterwards. In a time of decreasing budgets, we need a doctrine incorporating lessons learned from Desert Storm to select where to take cuts and perhaps to justify budget increases to meet the challenges of peace. As Unger's approach makes clear, we need both science and art together, as provided by the concept of frameworks.
Closed doctrine can’t apply to new warfare -- leads to miscalc as new technology develops – WWI proves
Temple ’92 Lt Col L. Parker Temple III, (USAF, Retired (USAFA; MBA, University of Northern Colorado; MS, West Coast University), is a private consultant on space policy and programs. “Of Machine Guns, Yellow Brick Roads, and Doctrine” Airpower Journal, Summer
First, we must recognize that AFM 1-1 must be changed. If we remain tied to its 1984 structure, we will have a doctrine manual but no doctrine with which to meet the challenges ahead. Second, we must pick a starting point in a dynamic world (today would be good), describing the framework of the Air Force as it has come to be. This includes the operation of the Air Force's frameworks, the underlying structures of these frameworks, and why the Air Force is structured the way it is for the various political, military, and economic reasons that actually underlie its present form. Simply describing the four-star commands is inadequate. We must tie the evolution of the Air Force to its history and judge what is good or bad about that legacy. Explicit historical reference couples meaning to doctrine and understanding when changes occur. Third, we must give insight into the role of weapon systems as they apply either within the existing framework or as they change the existing framework. Stealth or the Strategic Defense Initiative are instances in which the existing framework will cease to apply, and frameworks explain why this is so. Largely because of the strength and vision of its leaders, the Air Force has not drifted aimlessly since its inception. But we cannot always count on being so lucky. We must be able to bring people on board quickly in the case of a national emergency. The lessons of World War I's "Peace for All Time" aftermath must not be forgotten. Nor can we continue to fool ourselves that our people understand the Air Force's frameworks well enough to avoid unwise or frivolous resource expenditures. Now is the time to devote our best and most experienced minds to the development of an adequate doctrine before we make mistakes more devastating than the British in regard to the machine gun in 1914
2NC Overview
This debate round is practice for war-planning and the role of the ballot should be to arbitrate between methodologies for creating military doctrine. The counterplan creates a framework for changing doctrine that is responsive to changing battlefield conditions, historical experience and the development of new technological innovations. THE COUNTERPLAN IMMEDIATELY RESULTS IN THE PLAN, if the 1AC is correct that the plan is the proper response to current geopolitical conditions HOWEVER it allows for the possibility of minor modification and future rollback in response to unknown long-term developments in which the rigorous criteria of adaptive doctrinal shift are met, including empirical evidence and verification, field testing of weapons systems in simulations and training exercises and intellectual testing by academic at military service academies. Our net-benefit is dogmatism- trading one inadaptive doctrine for another means that the structural problems of mission creep, overlap and resource allocation are inevitable with the development of new technology and focus on new areas of the world making all of their scenarios inevitable. ONLY the counterplan facilitates effective force structure that allows us to learn from our mistakes which means that effective implementation is a DA to the plan and a net-benefit to the counterplan. Inflexible and untested doctrine guarantees disaster and loss of life
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
The second thing that doctrine is not is something that can be safely cut off from the uncompromising evidence of the battlefield. Any attempt to develop concepts, doctrines, or principles for the actual practice of war that fails to ground itself squarely in concrete battle experience risks outright disaster. To insist that there is little to be gained from trying to nail down a notion like doctrine in words does not mean that one is unable either to produce obvious examples of doctrinal statements or to subject these statements to the test of experience. For example, consider Brigadier General Kenneth N. Walker's famous maxim that a well-planned and well-conducted bombardment attack, once launched, cannot be stopped.23 In the hands of Air Corps Tactical School bombardment advocates, this assertion was eventually construed to mean that bombers like the B-17 Flying Fortress could be sufficiently self-defending to penetrate enemy defenses and bomb the target without unacceptable or uneconomic losses.24 What we would emphasize here is the historical lack of support in actual combat experience for this bomber penetration doctrine. The first missions of the American daylight bomber offensive from the United Kingdom were flown in August 1942. By October of that year, the senior leaders of the U.S. Eighth Air Force were "absolutely convinced," based on the command's experiences against targets in France and the Low Countries, that a force of 300 or more unescorted heavy bombers could "attack any target in Germany with less than 4 percent losses."25 It took time, though, to build up the force structure in England necessary to raise Eighth's dispatchable bomber strength to the 300-plus level. For a variety of reasons, it was not until the summer of 1943 that Eighth Air Force's Commander, General Ira C. Eaker, managed to accumulate enough B-24s and B-17s to begin putting the idea of self-defending bomber formations to the test. The bitter dénouement of this grand doctrinal experiment in early October 1943 is well known. Without fighter protection all the way to the target, the bombers proved far more vulnerable than had been calculated. Over the period 8-14 October 1943, Eighth Air Force mounted four all-out efforts to break through the German fighter defenses unescorted. Since a total of 1410 heavy bombers were dispatched, losses should not have exceeded fifty-six B-17s and B-24s, according to doctrine.26 However, Eighth lost 148 bombers and crews outright, mostly as a result of determined opposition from Luftwaffe fighters.27 Adding in the fifteen additional heavies that returned damaged beyond economical repair, these four missions cost Eighth Air Force 21 percent of bombers on hand in its tactical units and at least 31 percent of its heavy-bomber crews.28 As General Holley justifiably said in his 1974 Harmon Memorial Lecture, "The vigor with which Luftwaffe pilots subsequently pressed . . . attacks on 8th . . . formations over Festung Europa provides all the commentary that is necessary for this particular bit of doctrinal myopia."29 Although Eighth's bombers had not been turned away from their targets, General Walker's penetration doctrine had failed the test of World War II battle experience in the specific sense that German fighter defenses had shown themselves able to impose unsupportable losses on the American bomber formations.30 Even more significantly, the Army Air Corps' prewar penetration doctrine also lacked justification in prior combat experience from World War I. During the early years of the Air Officers School at Langley Field, Virginia, when the experience of the Great War was still heavily relied on, the prevailing view among the instructors had been that pursuit (fighter) aviation dedicated to gaining and holding control of the air was a necessary prerequisite for successful bombardment operations. The school's texts up to 1927 made this point clear: Pursuit in its relationship to the Air Service . . . may be compared to the infantry in its relationship to the other branches of the Army. Without Pursuit, the successful employment of the other branches is impossible. Pursuit aviation will provide the main protection for Bombardment aircraft.31 So to suggest that the main reason for the doctrinal myopia regarding bomber penetration that came to dominate Air Corps Tactical School thinking during the 1930s was insufficient experience seems dubious history at best. Admittedly, from the standpoint of tactical detail, bombardment enthusiasts such as General Walker (and later, General Eaker himself) did make their theoretical extrapolations from "a virtually clean slate."32 Also, in the context of their heartfelt desire for autonomy from the U.S. Army, it is easy to understand why these same air power crusaders tended to be overly optimistic where the emerging technology of the B-17 was concerned.33 But in a more fundamental sense, they were the ones who chose to erase the slate of experience. This conclusion may seem harsh. Certainly, the various American airmen who advocated daylight, precision bombardment during the 1930s and early 1940s would be on firm ground in pointing out that World War I produced precious little empirical data on large-scale, sustained bombardment operations against the industrial heart of an enemy nation. Yet to accept this explanation as an adequate defense of bomber invincibility is to interpret the word experience in a dangerously narrow way. The seminal flaw in the doctrine of bomber invincibility was not a lack of empirical data either about large-scale bombardment operations or the aircraft technologies that had emerged by the outset of World War II. Rather, it was the refusal of American airmen, as a matter of basic doctrine, to recognize that in real war, as opposed to war on paper, one must interact with an animate adversary who is motivated, literally on pain of death, to respond in surprising and unpredictable ways.34 In their headlong rush to prove that strategic bombardment could be decisive, Eighth's bomber leaders were tempted to act as if, contrary to all past experience, they had forged an offensive weapon against which no enemy could defend successfully.31 Is it reasonable to suggest that American bomber enthusiasts might have read the record of past wars less narrowly, less parochially? All we can say is that during the 1920s and 1930s there were those who clearly did. As a case in point, we would offer the following excerpt from a 1936 U.S. Army translation of the introduction of the German army's field service regulations (or Truppenfuehrung) of 1933: Situations in war are of unlimited variety. They change often and suddenly and only rarely are from the first discernible. Incalculable elements are often of great influence. The independent will of the enemy is pitted against ours. Friction and mistakes are of everyday occurrence.36 It is difficult to overstate the profound difference between the Clausewitzian image of war so vividly articulated in this brief passage from the 1933 German Truppenfuehrung and a notion like the Army Air Corps' dictum about bomber invincibility. In any event, the lesson concerning doctrine's intimate relationship with combat experience should, by now, be apparent. As episodes like Eighth Air Force's costly failure in October 1943 to penetrate German air defenses unescorted demonstrate, flawed doctrine can cost lives. And the shortest road to flawed doctrine is to develop it in the abstract, that is, without sufficient attention to the uncompromising realities of battle.
2NC Overview
Responsive doctrine is key to socializing leadership within the context of military life and is necessary to manage escalation and inevitable conflict instability driven by the development of new military technologies
Temple ’92 Lt Col L. Parker Temple III, (USAF, Retired (USAFA; MBA, University of Northern Colorado; MS, West Coast University), is a private consultant on space policy and programs. “Of Machine Guns, Yellow Brick Roads, and Doctrine” Airpower Journal, Summer
The behavior we call war is wholly a creation of humans complying with the first attribute of frameworks. Discussions about the savagery of human nature aside, decisions about going to war, the means of conducting it, and the nature of that war are determined by humans. There is nothing especially profound in this other than the conclusion that war is not some instinctive behavior over which we are powerless. The second attribute means that any war represents some basic agreement by the combatants over the rules to be used. Whenever war is engaged, the societies on each side have some set of rules that they deem acceptable or unacceptable for the conduct of that war. Although they don't formally decide on rules beforehand, this is not far from the mark. The rules are bound by treaties, weaponry, technology availability, habits and practices rooted in assumptions about what is feasible and what is rational, and even implied rules about what is or is not allowed. Hitler could have used gas and chemical weapons in World War II but did not. The United States could have used tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam but did not. For the distinctions drawn here, it is not so important to understand these rules as being driven by policy, treaty, law, or moral beliefs. What matters is that each war has rules that are not violated. These rules, however, defy generalization across all wars and history. *Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2. The rules are formed well ahead of time and reflect the third key attribute, since they evolve as people settle down and agree that they have enough common interests for them to consider their futures mutually intertwined. They have more in common than they have to disagree about, and these common items form the core of the framework's rules for that society. The fourth attribute reflects the formation of the society's ability to deal with the common issues of security and defense. Just as every society will be different, so will their rules regarding warfare. The issues are resolved with some sense of the relative priority, prestige, and control of the organization that will provide these services. The Department of Defense (DOD) provides security and defense for our society within a hierarchy of other frameworks alongside the departments of State, Justice, and others; within the DOD, the Air Force's contributory framework is different from those of the Army and Navy; within the Air Force, the Strategic Air Command's framework differs to some degree from that of the Tactical Air Command. The societal hierarchy and its resolution of the common issues reflect the differences in the ability of the society to cope with the rest of the world. This, in turn, is reflected in the conduct of war and is an essential element of the differences between wars. The fifth key attribute means that once a society agrees to a basic set of common interests and the hierarchical institutions necessary for that society's functioning, the society resists further change. Because frameworks are created entities, we have the power to alter and even tear down part or all of any framework we establish. Although the military is reputed to be resistant to change, this is probably unjustified in recent frameworks. This century has seen tremendous changes in the nature and conduct of war, largely as a reflection of the more flexible frameworks of the military institutions evolved in the latter part of the century. Some military institutions have been veritably dynamic in changing and adapting. The advance of military-related technology has not allowed stability since development of the machine gun. This century's warfare testifies to society's ability to change frameworks despite resistance to change. Dynamic military frameworks preclude development of doctrine that remains stable for years. Doctrine must be as vital and dynamic as the framework it describes. The sixth key attribute covers the dynamics of framework evolution and the changing nature of the people within the military. People depend on context to derive meaning, understanding, and comfort within their framework. Even with uncertainty, danger, deprivation, and vagaries in military life, context plays an important role for every military member in coping. The frameworks for military organizations allow a certain number of people to do more than simply cope; they actually excel and thrive. Such people learn to exist and exploit to the fullest the opportunities available within the framework. Such people eventually become the leadership. Not all people are satisfied with the existing framework. Some are dissatisfied with the framework and merely cope with it, while a small number may play a role in changing and evolving the framework. Gen William ("Billy") Mitchell can be considered in the latter group, since he continually battled with his Army superiors over the role of air power. Of those who excel within the framework, there are some who can go beyond their present context. Gen H. H. ("Hap") Arnold exemplifies those who created the new framework of the Air Force.
2NC Solvency Wall
The aff is a form of concept. For it to be an effective doctrine, it must be based on tested fact
Holley 84 (I. B. Holley, Jr., Major General, USAFR (Ret) (B.A., Amherst; M.A., Ph.D., Yale University) is a Professor of History at Duke University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the National Defense University and the U.S. Military Academy and has taught at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Professor Holley served as chairman of the Advisory Committee on History to Secretary of the Air Force and as Mobilization Assistant to the Commander, Air University. “Concepts, Doctrines, Principles: Are You Sure You Understand These Terms?” Air University Review, July/August )
IN HIS famous study on the art of war, Baron Jomini attempted to identify the essentials of Napoleon's military genius. In so doing, he wrote many pages defining such key terms as strategy, tactics, etc. Jomini grasped the fundamental notion that without uniform definitions that were understood clearly by all readers and analysts, any search for sound military practice was certain to be flawed seriously.1
Unfortunately, Jomini's good advice has been ignored all too frequently in recent years by military writers. Thus, some articles today equate doctrine with "the philosophy of war," while others refer to doctrine as "concepts and principles"--as if all three terms were interchangeable. This confusion extends to even such official promulgations as JCS Pub. I, Dictionary of U.S. Military Terms for Joint Usage, which has, at one time or another, identified doctrine as "a combination of principles and policies" or as "fundamental principles."2 At the very least, such definitions are confusing, if not downright erroneous. Much might be gained from a concerted effort to achieve precision and uniformity in employing key military terminology.
WHAT is a concept? To conceive an idea is to formulate it in words in the mind. In the mind, it is notional; it exists only as a theory, an idea yet unproved. To conceptualize is to devise a mental construct, a picture in the brain that can be expressed in words eventually. Whether it resides in the mind or is revealed verbally, it is speculative, tentative, and usually malleable.
To illustrate the notion of a concept, let us look back to World War I. In the earliest days of that war, pilots from opposing sides mostly ignored one another on chance encounters in the air. Later, they armed their airplanes with machine guns, but soon they discovered that it was very difficult to hit a high-speed target from a moving platform. We can readily visualize one of the more creative individuals among them reflecting on the problem: "If I were to attack from dead astern, the enemy pilot would be far less liable to see me approach and there would be no deflection, no relative motion of the target in my sights, so it ought to be easier to make a kill with fewer shots." This mental image or concept in the reflective pilot's mind is a hypothesis--a conjectural conception to be proved true or false by trial and error.
In contrast to a concept, what is doctrine? Doctrine is what is being taught, i.e., rules or procedures drawn by competent authority. Doctrines are precepts, guides to action, and suggested methods for solving problems or attaining desired results.
Clearly, there is a marked difference between concepts and doctrines. Concepts spring from creative imagination. A perceptive observer draws an inference from one or more observed facts. An individual observes the springiness in a bent bough and infers that the thrust might be capable of projecting a missile; eventually, this initial conception, this tentative idea, leads to the bow and arrow--a major advance in the weaponry of mankind. So, too, the World War I pilot who first thought of attacking from dead astern came up with an innovative idea, a hypothesis. In each instance, the concept or hypothesis had to be tried in practice to confirm or confute the inference drawn by the reflective observer.
Doctrine, on the other hand, is an officially approved teaching based on accumulated experience. Numerous recorded instances have led to a generalization. To generalize is to infer inductively a common pattern from repeated experiences that have produced the same or similar results. In World War I, as more and more pilots tried attacking from above, astern, and out of the sun, they found the probability of making a kill tended to rise rapidly. On the basis of such experiences, reinforced by repetition, those who instructed neophyte pilots generalized this common pattern of attack into informal doctrine. Eventually, this informal doctrine appeared in manuals bearing the official imprimatur as formal doctrine.
Whereas a concept is a hypothesis or an inference which suggests that a proposed pattern of behavior may possibly lead to a desired result, a doctrine is a generalization based on sufficient evidence to suggest that a given pattern of behavior will probably lead to the desired result. While a concept is tentative and speculative, a doctrine is more assured. Doctrines are akin to rules, precepts or maxims, or a set of operations or moves reduced to more or less uniform procedures for meeting specific types of problems. Of course, in actual military practice, no hard and fast rules or maxims can be followed slavishly and mechanically in every instance with complete assurance that the anticipated and desired result will ineluctably follow. Because there are so many variables and imponderables in any military situation, doctrines must never be regarded as absolutes. Perhaps the best definition holds doctrine as that mode of approach which repeated experience has shown usually walks best.
Doctrine must be consistently changing- failure to do this causes dogmatism and collapses the doctrine
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER, A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
At the starting point of the process is the applicable body of experience, theory, and technology. We consolidate and analyze this information, then develop concepts, the equivalents of the theses and antitheses of a research paper. The next stage involves testing and evaluating the concepts, discussing, arguing, and debating their validity. We may then accept or reject concepts, or modify and synthesize them. The resulting product becomes formal doctrine, in writing, or informal doctrine, the refined beliefs lacking only the official sanction inherent in publication. We apply this informal or formal doctrine to warfighting—it is what Holley refers to as the best way to do the job.2 However, the cyclical process begins again, immediately, as we add new experience, theory, and technology.
The significance of the above cycle lies in its congruence. The creation of doctrine should be an iterative process which continuously validates new experiences and theories. Thus, formalized doctrine recognizes the presence of new technology and follows the next four steps: consolidation and analysis; development of concepts; test and evaluation; and acceptance or rejection. Only upon synthesis with the existing doctrine through the above process does technology establish the need to revise established doctrine. Clearly, the doctrinal process should not stop. Ideally, the formal product demands constant revision to accommodate the influx of new or evolving ideas, theories, and technology. At the point where doctrine fails to change, it becomes dogma. We then follow the formal doctrine as a formality, without honoring the process. Dogmatism can lead to a harmful pragmatism in warfighting, where we limit change because we are accustomed to the status quo falsely associated with formal doctrine. It is indeed easier to do things the way they have been done in the past, at least until we learn the hard lessons about present day reality. When doctrine become dogma, the overall process deteriorates into a closed cycle. New ideas, concepts, and technology are no longer the essential inputs for doctrinal change. How does dogma affect the development and incorporation of new weapon systems? Doctrine looks to the past in order to prepare for the future. If it embraces the inevitability of change, including technological change, then it should better prepare us for future conflicts and future needs.
Failure to develop new doctrines based on technological and geopolitical developments means that our weapon systems fail
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
When doctrine become dogma, the overall process deteriorates into a closed cycle. New ideas, concepts, and technology are no longer the essential inputs for doctrinal change. How does dogma affect the development and incorporation of new weapon systems? Doctrine looks to the past in order to prepare for the future. If it embraces the inevitability of change, including technological change, then it should better prepare us for future conflicts and future needs. However, as Holley points out in his benchmark book Ideas and Weapons, such is not always the case: If armies have been slow in applying the maxim that superior arms favor victory, it may be shown that their intransigence has resulted to a great extent from three specific shortcomings in the procedure for developing new weapons. These shortcomings appear to have been: a failure to adopt, actively and positively, the thesis that superior arms favor victory; a failure to recognize the importance of establishing a doctrine regarding the use of weapons; and a failure to devise effective techniques for recognizing and evaluating potential weapons in the advances of science and technology.3 According to Holley, effective doctrine helps define the best weapons to do the job. An effective doctrine process prevents dogmatic or pragmatic development of weapon systems. Holley uses the Unites States’ slow development of an effective bomber during World War I to illustrate an incongruent process. We may use the continued development and procurement of the B-2 as another example.
Lack of doctrinal change means we are stuck using old technology- lead times
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
The issue of numbers of aircraft in being raises another consideration in the relationship between technology and doctrine: lead times. At the most basic level, we may not have the luxury of waiting for aircraft to be built. In a major contingency, “something nearer 75 percent rather than 100 percent of the surviving bomber force is a more reasonable figure to represent operational availability for aircraft in sustained operations at extreme ranges against formidable defenses.”20 Here is a situation where appropriate technology should follow doctrinal requirements. In other words, doctrine should ideally precede technology to define the best weaponry. The question of lead time becomes increasingly problematic with the added complexities of the acquisition and production processes. W. Harriet Critchley uses the rational model alternatively to illustrate the ideal doctrine cycle: The rational model applies readily to an analysis of the relationship between strategic doctrine and weapons development....A strategic doctrine is...fashioned from the optimal combination of alternatives [for defense] to the range of threats. Finally, weapons are acquired or developed and armed forces are organized in accordance with the dictates of strategic doctrine.21 Military weapon systems on average have at least five- to eight-year lead times from initial conception to production.22 The time from the start of production to IOC increases this lead time, sometimes substantially. In the interim, doctrine should be changing with new ideas, new experiences, and new technologies. Unfortunately the processes of acquisition and production, complicated by politics, are not always sufficiently flexible to adapt to rapid doctrinal changes. The result: a potential mismatch between the most current doctrine and the weapon system which is supposed to fit within that doctrine. Modern weapon systems—the B-1B, the Sea Wolf, and the B-2, among others— amply demonstrate the significance of lead times. The Air Force requested proposals for a stealth bomber design in 1980; and the B-2 will reach IOC in 1997. In the meantime, the originally projected 132 B-2s fell to 21; the Cold War ended; and Desert Storm took place. The final bomber will not be operational until the next century, extending the total lead time to over two decades. Unfortunately, there is no ready solution to the dilemma; we can only recognize the problem and not allow it to affect doctrinal progress. To do less would perpetuate the dogmatism and pragmatism of the past.
Doctrinal development key to force structuring – developing PRIOT to weapons systems is key
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf
One way to view military doctrine is as the blueprint for force planning.13 “Doctrine takes the conceptual notions of the functions to be served by military operations and, as General LeMay said, ‘lays the pattern’ from which the force structure can be constructed.”14 When the force structure precedes the doctrine, deficiencies may arise. Such is the case with the B-2, which must now fit within the conventionally oriented doctrine of strategic attack. Alone, this reversal in the doctrine cycle is problematic. It also reveals the incongruencies between conventional and nuclear roles: What has been lacking in the past is the will to use bombers seriously in a conventional conflict. Their survivability and the accuracy needed to cause damage in proportion to their massive weapon load is also a concern. The first problem has been addressed by the formation of ACC; the second and third are being dealt with by upgrades and new technology.15 In the case of the B-2, the Air Force must still await some of the backfill of technology, particularly the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), not available until the end of the decade. (“The USAF plans to buy only eight 16-weapon loads of GATS/GAM to provide an interim, near-PGM capability for the B-2 until JDAM is available.”16): Without a guided weapon, however, the B-2 is confined to medium- altitude area bombing: although the B-2 can fly at low level and Mach 0.8, no commander would expose so scarce and valuable an aircraft to random ground-fire as a first resort.17
Key to military success – ONLY the CP accesses heg
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
Success in war depends more on mental than physical capabilities. Even the most sophisticated military establishment can be outsmarted by people with greater mental acuity. Roughly paraphrasing and turning the tables on Voltaire, history is replete with examples of God smiling on the side with the smarter divisions. Our doctrine represents (or should represent) the apex of our thinking about the best ways to use airpower. It is our theory of victory. 15 As such, it deserves our best intellectual efforts and our utmost at tention. In the past, our doctrine has received neither. The first step in correcting this unacceptable situation is to treat the development of doctrine as a profoundly important and continuous intellectual process rather than simply a bureaucratic requirement.
Adaption to new threats sustains space use for terrestrial applications
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The argument in this paper is that the US military needs to mature its command and control approach to space in order to best integrate the growing role of space in theater operations. The previous chapters have discussed the what (command and control), the where (theater), and the why (space-enabled warfare), and in addition compared the how (Space Authority vs. JFSCC). In this chapter, the who and the when of the JFSCC are explored as three challenges: doctrine, politics, and resources and timing. These two final aspects, who and when, may represent the most difficult part of the JFSCC concept because they suggest near-term change to the existing order of things. But it is also necessary. Space technology is evolving to offer new capabilities to the warfighter. Organizations must adapt to new capabilities and effectively integrate them into their operations. The tank, machine gun, and airplane were technical advances that redefined military operations. The adaptation of the world’s militaries to these new technologies required significant change that some addressed better than others.182 The author proposes that the US military must adapt to the new capabilities emerging in space. If space is the cornerstone of modern military operations, the issues of who and when of the JFSCC are challenges that must be addressed sooner rather than later.
Doctrine is key to technological development- Failure to take into account strategic changes means we use outdated tech that fails
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf
The B-2 poses a significant dilemma in our understanding of sound doctrinal development and the selection of winning weapons. We must recognize this particular weapon system as the offspring of one doctrine, and the inheritor of another. As such, it bears the burden of past dogmatism and must accept its place among new ideas. It represents the imperfect relationship between ideas and weapons. Doctrine and technological development should be interrelated. Ideally, concepts, validated through experience, lead to doctrine; we then derive the technological means for implementing that doctrine. Thus, we should formulate the doctrine, then build appropriate weapon systems. In the case of long-range strategic bombers, the Air Force initially followed this process, then became so entrenched in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence that it allowed dogmatism and pragmatism to drive the acquisition of manned aircraft. At the tail end of a string of bombers is the B-2, a weapon system first promoted within obsolete doctrine, then forced to fit within the evolving strategic attack doctrine of the 1990s. Its advanced technology and potential capabilities belie the doctrinal inconsistencies. The uncomfortable relationship between the B-2 and Air Force doctrine should ultimately serve as a lesson for future acquisitions of weapons and weapon systems. While we cannot overcome such impediments as long lead times and unanticipated changes in the strategic environment, we must at least better understand how the doctrinal process should work. We can then be prepared to change doctrine as inputs to the ongoing cycle demand, and perhaps come closer to coherence among ideas, technology, and practice.
Evolving doctrine key to use space effectively for terrestrial applications –Also key to space weapon use
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The thesis of this paper is that the US military needs to mature its command and control approach for space to best integrate the growing role of space in theater operations—in particular, the approach to command and control of theater space operations. Indeed, the notion of theater space operations is a rather new one. The more traditional notion is of global space operations, with operators stationed in the United States controlling global, on-orbit satellites. Theater warfighters, as consumers of these global space effects, request support from the global provider. Theater command and control of space, in the past, boiled down to a prioritized list of requirements for United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to fulfill. This approach, embodied as the Space Authority in joint doctrine, is inadequate to address the growing role of space in theater operations. A more mature command and control approach to theater space operations is required to integrate space into the operational and tactical levels of warfare. Space command and control, theater or global, is a topic that few would find exciting. Doctrine for many is trivial matter, something best to be avoided. Yet doctrine codifies powerful ideas on the best way of doing business and, for US military operations, it provides the playbook for the entire joint team. Some may take this thesis for a separate space force or a give-space-to-the-Air-Force polemic, but it is neither. This thesis is about getting the space piece of the joint playbook right. Addressing theater space operations in joint doctrine is a small but necessary step. As Mahan commented over a hundred years ago, the continual change in weapons requires a continual change in the manner of fighting. The weapons are changing, so must the manner of fighting.
Doctrine is important for useful policies that involve value and intellectual process.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
THE TRUTH OF THE matter is that the US Air Force does not have any sort of systematized process for developing its doctrine. Continu ous pronouncements from the highest command levels over the past 50 years have trumpeted the importance of sound doctrine. 1 Yet, no system or organized intel lectual process exists to capture and evaluate ideas and concepts and then formulate them into useful doctrine.
Of course, we do have an established bureaucratic process that produces official doctrine publications. 2 The Air Force has even gone to the trouble of estab lishing a Doctrine Center at Langley AFB, Virginia, to act as the focal point for all of its doctrinal efforts. Bu reaucratic processes, however, are not intellectual processes—even though we all too often substitute the former for the latter. Bureaucratic processes cause things to happen (or prevent them from happening) in some orderly manner. Determining whether the re sults (if they are allowed to occur) are good, bad, right, or wrong is measured by conformance to the process itself rather than by intrinsic qualities and values.
An intellectual process may indeed be imbedded within the bureaucratic process. One hopes that such would be the case. Further, one hopes that the bureau cratic process itself would systematically evaluate the subject or purpose of the process for its intrinsic value. Unfortunately, this is often not the case and is particu larly not the case in the development of Air Force doctrine. Within the established bureaucratic process for producing doctrine, we have no organized system or process for gathering, consolidating, and analyzing his torical and theoretical data. We have no ground rules for developing concepts and evaluating competing con cepts. In short, no systematic intellectual process ex ists for the development of Air Force doctrine
Airforce Doctrine Fails
Air doctrine applied to space fails:
a. Different Environment
Myers and Tockston, 98 *deputy director for space operations, US Space Command AND **chief, Policy Division, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command, (Summer 1998, Col Kenneth A. and Lt Col John G., Airpower Journal, “Real Tenets of Military Space Doctrine”, SW)
Space Environment Current doctrine defines the "aerospace" environment as a "total expanse beyond the Earth's surface" and "space" as the "outer reaches of the aerospace operational medium."20 Based on this sweeping premise, space doctrine seems to be formulated simply by substituting the word aerospace for air in well-proven air power doctrine. The oft-posed argument that no boundary separates air from space thereby results in the first major compromise of environmental doctrine for space. Actually, the space environment is readily discerned from air when a vehicle attains orbital flight capability outside the earth's atmosphere. Moreover a distinct threshold is crossed when atmospheric forces and powered flight yield to a hard vacuum and a state of weightlessness where dynamical motions are governed solely by natural forces. Although multidimensional, space is an infinitely larger operating medium than air. Furthermore, the absence of both gravity and a molecular environment provides a distinctly different operating regime than the atmosphere.
b. Different goals
Myers and Tockston, 98 *deputy director for space operations, US Space Command AND **chief, Policy Division, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command, (Summer 1998, Col Kenneth A. and Lt Col John G., Airpower Journal, “Real Tenets of Military Space Doctrine”, SW)
Characteristics of Space Systems The second major compromise of space doctrine derives from the characteristics currently attributed to "aerospace" forces--speed, range, and flexibility.21 These characteristics well exemplify the attributes of airplanes, and they lie at the heart of air doctrine. However, the speed and range of airplanes pale in comparison with those of satellites; conversely, airplanes are far more flexible than satellites. Therefore, these are not the key characteristics that should be ascribed to satellites as effective military assets. These characteristics in no way capture the global context and unseen but ubiquitous nature of satellite operations that should comprise the very core of space doctrine. In actuality, the relevant characteristics of space forces are emplacement, pervasiveness, and timeliness. The space environment allows emplacement of satellites in prescribed mission orbits from which rapid, efficient operational support may be provided to defense forces. Manned or unmanned space assets, on station continuously, are always ready to support a broad spectrum of potential conflict. There is no need for a "call-up" or a deployment of space forces because satellites are constantly maintained in a high state of wartime readiness. In contrast with other defense forces--generated only during training or actual hostilities--satellites are fully operational in peacetime; they execute their missions day and night, and they are inherently ready to support military operations at all times. The pervasiveness of space forces reflects the ethereal nature of their operations and capabilities. The space medium is all-encompassing--surrounding the media of land, sea, and air. This fact permits an omnipresence or a proliferation of space forces for support of defense requirements at any air or terrestrial location. Their consistent presence over enemy territory serves as a strong deterrent, for they can constantly monitor the readiness and status of opposing forces. Satellites therefore diminish the element of surprise and deny sanctuary to enemies except for those forces that enemies themselves may attempt to hide in space. Timeliness of space forces is closely related to the first two characteristics. Satellites, always ready and omnipresent, can provide near-instantaneous response to military commanders anytime, anywhere. Unlike many defense forces, they rely inherently upon electronic phenomena and electromagnetic propagation of signals and radiation in conducting their missions. Thus, satellite operations are conducted at the speed of light, permitting near-real-time transfer of information and facilitating rapid application of force upon an enemy.
Evolution from current doctrine is key to distinguishing space doctrine from airpower doctrine
Myers and Tockston, 98 *deputy director for space operations, US Space Command AND **chief, Policy Division, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command, (Summer 1998, Col Kenneth A. and Lt Col John G., Airpower Journal, “Real Tenets of Military Space Doctrine”, SW)
Space Force Employment Concepts Since current "aerospace" doctrine fails to distinguish between the operating environment, characteristics, and capabilities of satellites vis-à-vis airplanes, it should not be surprising that the broad employment concepts defined in AFM 1-1 have little relevance to space forces.24 However, it is possible to synthesize some broad concepts of employment for effective space operations, based on experience and proven operational practices in the military space community. The synthesis starts by surveying the various mission areas that are (or soon could be) accomplished by space forces. Then, by invoking the above tenets of environmental doctrine, the article develops real concepts for employment of space forces similar to those espoused for air doctrine in AFM 1-1. This procedure relies on the oft-invoked premise that, although no base of experience exists for war in space, "doctrine may (and should) still be developed by analysis of postulated actions"25 or by a "theory [that provides]... the framework for future application."26
2NC Permutation
The plan creates a doctrinal change governing the use of existing weapons systems that is designed to settle their mission forever more. The counterplan PICs out of both the doctrinal specificity and the durable fiated nature of the plan by establishing a criteria for military planners to create doctrine on a continuously evolving basis, changing the roles and missions of weapons systems to respond to evolving threats.
Double-bind: Permutations either
A. Sever out of the restriction of roles/missions of the plan and the durable nature of fiat—severance is allows the aff to skew negative ground entirely, voting issue for fairness OR
B. Permutation doesn’t solve our net-benefit—continuously changing doctrine is key to maximizing weapons systems capabilities
Kono ‘97
Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research PaperPresented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf
Doctrine and technological development should be interrelated. Ideally, concepts, validated through experience, lead to doctrine; we then derive the technological means for implementing that doctrine. Thus, we should formulate the doctrine, then build appropriate weapon systems. In the case of long-range strategic bombers, the Air Force initially followed this process, then became so entrenched in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence that it allowed dogmatism and pragmatism to drive the acquisition of manned aircraft. At the tail end of a string of bombers is the B-2, a weapon system first promoted within obsolete doctrine, then forced to fit within the evolving strategic attack doctrine of the 1990s. Its advanced technology and potential capabilities belie the doctrinal inconsistencies. The uncomfortable relationship between the B-2 and Air Force doctrine should ultimately serve as a lesson for future acquisitions of weapons and weapon systems. While we cannot overcome such impediments as long lead times and unanticipated changes in the strategic environment, we must at least better understand how the doctrinal process should work. We can then be prepared to change doctrine as inputs to the ongoing cycle demand, and perhaps come closer to coherence among ideas, technology, and practice.
The 1AC doctrinal focus on abstract roles/missions makes their doctrinal formulations absurd
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
FINALLY, however one elects to think about basic air power doctrine, it must be firmly grounded on hard evidence. To view Air Force doctrine primarily in terms of abstract roles and missions requiring zealous protection tends to equate past success with historical validity. True, the United States and its allies won World War II; and after that war, American airmen won service autonomy. But neither of these victories can be said to have validated the Air Force's basic doctrine to any great degree. The unpleasant reality is that, beyond clearly foreseeing the future importance of air power at a time when most men did not, the majority of American air commanders, as late as the fall of 1943, "failed completely to grasp the essential meaning of air superiority," and every salient prewar belief of American air strategists "was either overthrown or drastically modified by the experience of war."58 Our air doctrine, in short, has not always enjoyed the firmest basis in empirical fact. And if we hope to do better in the future, then we must never forget that the ultimate arbiter of doctrinal beliefs is whether they help us to prevail in the air. "Anything else," as Baron Manfred von Richthofen once said, "is absurd."59
Doctrine must be consistently changing- failure to do this causes dogmatism and collapses the doctrine
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER, A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
At the starting point of the process is the applicable body of experience, theory, and technology. We consolidate and analyze this information, then develop concepts, the equivalents of the theses and antitheses of a research paper. The next stage involves testing and evaluating the concepts, discussing, arguing, and debating their validity. We may then accept or reject concepts, or modify and synthesize them. The resulting product becomes formal doctrine, in writing, or informal doctrine, the refined beliefs lacking only the official sanction inherent in publication. We apply this informal or formal doctrine to warfighting—it is what Holley refers to as the best way to do the job.2 However, the cyclical process begins again, immediately, as we add new experience, theory, and technology.
The significance of the above cycle lies in its congruence. The creation of doctrine should be an iterative process which continuously validates new experiences and theories. Thus, formalized doctrine recognizes the presence of new technology and follows the next four steps: consolidation and analysis; development of concepts; test and evaluation; and acceptance or rejection. Only upon synthesis with the existing doctrine through the above process does technology establish the need to revise established doctrine. Clearly, the doctrinal process should not stop. Ideally, the formal product demands constant revision to accommodate the influx of new or evolving ideas, theories, and technology. At the point where doctrine fails to change, it becomes dogma. We then follow the formal doctrine as a formality, without honoring the process. Dogmatism can lead to a harmful pragmatism in warfighting, where we limit change because we are accustomed to the status quo falsely associated with formal doctrine. It is indeed easier to do things the way they have been done in the past, at least until we learn the hard lessons about present day reality. When doctrine become dogma, the overall process deteriorates into a closed cycle. New ideas, concepts, and technology are no longer the essential inputs for doctrinal change. How does dogma affect the development and incorporation of new weapon systems? Doctrine looks to the past in order to prepare for the future. If it embraces the inevitability of change, including technological change, then it should better prepare us for future conflicts and future needs.
Space doctrine must be constantly adapted to remain effective
Zehner, 04 supports the Space and Missile Defense Command Force Development and Integra- tion Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. He retired from the Air Force in 2001 after a tour on the Joint Staff. He commanded two launch squadrons at Vandenberg Air Force Base (Fall 2004, Ed, Army Space Journal, “Developing Space Doctrine”,
SW)
As for the road ahead, since there are a number of important issues that are at a very dynamic stage right now, FDIC plans to post the first revision to the FM within about a year. The fact is, this was a difficult version to produce because Space capabilities are so ubiquitous in their contribution to the Army, and they are not “owned” by SMDC or any single major command. There are multiple competing interests that are difficult to reconcile in this document, but the common drive for U.S. Army land warfighting dominance provides a unifying forum from which to progress. Effectively establishing and communicating doctrinal principles and TTP for all of Army Space is a fast-moving objective requiring impatient persistence, and persist we will. If you have doctrinal issues you believe should be included, please give Richard Burks at FDIC at richard.burks@smdc-cs.army.mil an outline of your thoughts, or send them to the FDIC doctrine email which is annotated in the FM’s preface, fdiccd@smdc.army.mil.
“Global power brings global responsibilities to our nation and the Army. Among its array of formidable capabilities designed to fulfill those responsibilities, the Army’s Space reach is global, with assets and operations literally around the world.” FM 3-14.00
Open-ended and continuous doctrine development is key—the plan is simply an episodically published doctrine change that cramps research about appropriate use of new weapons systems and responses to emerging threats within artificial time constraints and prevents adaptation—the is the WORST solution
Drew ’95 Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995
The world does not hold its breath between publications of doctrine. New experiences accrue constantly. New technologies emerge and mature constantly. New theory and new interpretations of existing theory are the constant fodder of the military-academic community. Thus, the intellectual process of developing doc-trine should be continuous. Only the publication of doctrine is episodic. If we recognize the continuous nature of doctrine development, the implications become very clear. Allocation of research topics to subject-matter experts should not be forced to fit within a publishing schedule. Rather, the schedule should be forced to fit the acceptance of new concepts as doctrine. Research and the development of concepts should be continuous and open-ended. Spirited discussion of concepts in professional journals should never abate, and conferences/ symposia should be sponsored on a regular, recurring basis. In short, the process of doctrine development should not be episodic. Instead, it should be a continuous, self-renewing flow. As the process of doctrine development constantly flows, with no real beginning or end, the question then becomes when to publish and when to get a “snapshot in time” that temporarily answers the fundamental re-search question, What is the best way to use airpower? One way to finesse the problem would be to publish doctrine in a loose-leaf format that would facilitate interim page changes. Another approach would schedule publication only when a certain percentage of the entire doctrine manual clearly requires significant change. The worst solution would put doctrine publication on a time-based schedule with no regard for the significance of changes required.
Only open-ended rigorous doctrine-forming methodologies that remain flexible to new ideas and changing conditions can solve war-fighting
Drew ’95 Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995
Success in war depends more on mental than physical capabilities. Even the most sophisticated military establishment can be outsmarted by people with greater mental acuity. Roughly paraphrasing and turning the tables on Voltaire, history is replete with examples of God smiling on the side with the smarter divisions. Our doctrine represents (or should represent) the apex of our thinking about the best ways to use airpower. It is our theory of victory. 15 As such, it de-serves our best intellectual efforts and our utmost attention. In the past, our doctrine has received neither. The first step in correcting this unacceptable situation is to treat the development of doctrine as a profoundly important and continuous intellectual process rather than simply a bureaucratic requirement.
Doctrine must be constantly evolving to develop
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
According to Drew, "the principle source of doctrine is experience [and] the accurate analysis and interpretation of history (experience)." 16 When no empirical experience exists, one must extrapolate from other, known
areas and attempt to project the probable character of future wars. 17 New doctrines (those without historical precedent) frequently emerge from un- official sources as extrapolations and become official only when forced by war or when conclusively demonstrated by peacetime weapons systems tests or in military exercises. For example, despite their impact on naval warfare, Alfred Thayer Mahan's writings were not officially embraced by the Navy until many years after their release.18 Col Robert Swedenburg describes how the Air Corps Tactical School played a key role in translating unofficial air doctrines into practice. The school's effectiveness "stemmed from its ability to foresee future concepts of war, and these concepts were thus embodied in the development of air doctrine. Sound doctrine, valid requirements, and new technology were related in an immutable fashion." 19 Though it had to wait for years for the aircraft to be made available, the school was able to eventually evaluate doctrine by flying and testing aircraft. Conclusions about air doctrine and force structure were accepted after extensive weapon demonstrations. While the Air Corps Tactical School made some errors-notably the daylight strategic bombing episode detailed in the next section-it based its approach firmly in analysis and in ex- perience gained from experimentation. This approach adequately satisfies Drew's definition of doctrine. US space doctrine, however, takes a different path.
Only the rigorous method for forming doctrine that is flexible to changing technology and geopolitical events can result in functional and adaptive nuclear missions policy-making—any permutation that asserts doctrine at the beginning of the process taints the research efforts and bankrupt the rigor of the method
Drew ’95 Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995
Experience forms the foundation of doctrine, which is another way of saying that history—ours and others’— forms the primary source material for writers of doc-trine.5 Thus, the research plan—represented by the box in the upper-left corner of figure 1—must find a way to explore the relevant history for each subject treated by the doctrine. This effort must go far beyond simple library research, extending into the often overlooked experience of exercises, maneuvers, and perhaps even computer war games and simulations. Finally, the historical research not only should look at “what happened” but also should weigh previous interpretations of “why” and “how,” as well as the significance of “what happened.” Although doctrine’s roots are primarily embedded in history, some subjects have no basis in empirical evidence. In these areas, the doctrine writer must rely on theory. Most subjects dealing with the use of nuclear weapons or deterrence, for example, fall into this category. Nuclear war has never occurred (notwithstanding Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and nuclear deterrence remains only a theoretical construct. Finally, the doctrine writer’s research plan must take into account advances in technology that may temper or perhaps even obviate the “lessons” of the past. The fact that the technology in question may be unproved in combat operations puts the doctrine re-searcher in a difficult situation. The latest gee-whiz gadget may offer great promise for overcoming previous problems or for providing revolutionary capabilities, may be highly touted by its manufacturer, may have great political sensitivity in terms of the budget, but may be absolutely unproved in the crucible of war. We have yet to devise practicable field-testing procedures that can accurately replicate the reality of combat. Although very “realistic” regimes for training and testing now exist, they are not “real.” Obviously, this sort of situation presents serious dilemmas for the doc-trine researcher. Gather and Analyze the Data Gathering the historical, theoretical, and technological data concerning each discrete subject within the doc-trine is not only a massive task, but also one that—if performed incorrectly—can defeat the purpose of the entire process. The most common problem is predisposition—gathering only the evidence that supports preconceived concepts about the subject at hand. One suspects that preconceived concepts may often originate at higher levels of command. As a result, the re-searcher stacks the evidence and then “cooks the books.” If the evidence is stacked in support of pre-conceived notions, the effort to evaluate and analyze the evidence becomes skewed at best—worthless at worst. Once the evidence is gathered and consolidated in a usable format, the analysis must evaluate its pertinence. Certain pieces of evidence may no longer be relevant because of technological developments. For example, data on bombing accuracy from the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II and related in-formation concerning tactical formations, damage expectations, requirements for subsequent strikes, and doctrinal notions derived from such experience may not be nearly as important to airpower operations in an era of precision guided munitions. Formulate and Evaluate Potential Answers to the Research Question Analysis of the gathered data should generate new concepts or reinforce existing concepts. For example, analysis of data concerning the success of stealth technology may change our concepts for organizing and “packaging” strike forces. Rather than employ large force packages of strike and support aircraft, we may now favor individual sorties by stealthy strike aircraft. Other people may disagree, perhaps arguing that the data is inconclusive or that stealthy penetration may be impracticable during daylight hours or that stealth capabilities may not be effective against certain opponents with advanced air defense systems. In short, competing concepts may emerge from analysis of the data. Whether the concepts developed are new and/or competing and/or reinforcing, they need to be tested and evaluated. Actions can range from actual field testing (although such testing would probably be more common for tactical doctrine than for basic doctrine) to debate in forums such as professional journals, symposia, and the like. The objective is to examine concepts in depth, compare, contrast, identify strengths and weaknesses, and modify.
2NC Competition Theory
The counterplan is textually and functionally competitive and is substantively distinct from the formal political action of the plan EVEN THOUGH IT IMMEDIATELY RESULTS IN THE PLAN. Our Kono evidence provides a slew of reasons why in the instance of military planning, the METHODS OF FORMING doctrines are a key. This method question evaluatively precedes implementation
Bartlett ‘90, professor of law at Duke University, 1990 (Katharine, 103 Harvard Law Review 829, February, lexis)
Feminists have developed extensive critiques of law n2 and proposals for legal reform. n3 Feminists have had much less to say, however, about what the "doing" of law should entail and what truth status to give to the legal claims that follow. These methodological issues matter because methods shape one's view of the possibilities for legal practice and reform. Method "organizes the apprehension of truth; it determines what counts as evidence and defines what is taken as verification." n4 Feminists cannot ignore method, because if they seek to challenge existing structures of power with the same methods that [*831] have defined what counts within those structures, they may instead "recreate the illegitimate power structures [that they are] trying to identify and undermine." n5
Even if we don’t win these arguments, the counterplan still competes off of durable fiat as per the 1AC cross-ex. Counterplans should be able to compete off of 1AC cross-ex answers:
A. Key to Stable Ground- the plan is less that 5% of the 1AC and yet is the most important stable locus of offense—if we can’t test this ground with counterplans then there is no stable neg ground
B. Encourages Cross-ex Strategy- aff teams should think through answers to cross-ex questions ahead of time but are unmotivated to do so if they think they can’t be tied to them
C. Motivates Effective Cross-Ex Skills- Intrinsically valuable skill set in many professions, this is a valuable sort of education for acquiring information
D. Strategic Innovation- this allows for strategies based on predictable cross-examination but that requires advance research allowing for exploration of the key parts of the plan that are not talked about otherwise—for example you shouldn’t be able to read a ‘reductions’ aff if you can’t defend what happens to weapons after plan passage
And durability competition is justified:
A. Key to Neg Ground- the aff should have to defend the plan both in the present and future- otherwise they’d always get an intrinsicness argument against any DA with a future timeframe
B. No Brightline- the aff can make rollback arguments making them anti-topical—this skews neg ground and ruins the debate but there is no resolutional check outside of these counterplans
C. Tests Future Desirability- if the aff is a bad idea for next year then it shouldn’t be done this year, real-world policy is built to last and they have not met the affirmative burden if they can’t defend the plan is a necessarily good idea in the future
Both of the above reasons are a reason to reject the team if the 1AR extends a permutation because our ground skew arguments are amplified in the time-pressed 2nr and theory-focus trivialize substantive debate, voter for fairness
The doctrine process requires multiple revisions.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
The obvious final step is to apply the doctrine. As noted earlier, the Air Staff has used basic doctrine extensively to fight the good fight over budgets, roles and mis sions, weapons systems, and so forth. Elsewhere, the application of doctrine has been spotty at best. Such results are to be expected if one writes basic doctrine for use within the Pentagon, without any concerted educational program to teach it to the bulk of the force. The application step yields a result, which adds to the body of data (experience), from which we develop doctrine—thus bringing the process of doctrine devel opment full cycle. It continues as we add daily to the body of experience and generate new ideas. The pub lication of doctrine is episodic, but its development should be continuous. With this in mind, a slightly modified version of the doctrine process paints a more accurate picture. Figure 2 displays a process of continuous devel opment, but here the writing and publication of doctrine are episodic. At the same time, the illustration indicates that we accept, teach, and apply new con cepts even though we have not published new doctrine. This is what we might call informal doctrine on the best way to use airpower—beliefs that evolve con stantly but have not been written, published, and offi cially sanctioned. 7
A2: Perception-Based Advantages
ONLYL the CP solves -- effective space doctrine is key to communicate with the army for the proper use of satellites in terrestrial warfare- that’s the key internal to US military dominance that signals our hegemony
Zehner, 04 supports the Space and Missile Defense Command Force Development and Integra- tion Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. He retired from the Air Force in 2001 after a tour on the Joint Staff. He commanded two launch squadrons at Vandenberg Air Force Base (Fall 2004, Ed, Army Space Journal, “Developing Space Doctrine”,
SW)
Space support to Army operations is a critical element of the continuing success of Army land warfighting dominance. It is so pervasive it seems awkward to use one term, Space support, to describe all that is going on. Space-based capabili- ties support literally every Army operation because we have learned to take advantage of the impact Space can bring. The pages of this and every issue of the Army Space Journal testify to the many applications and undeniable utility of Space capabilities to terrestrial warfare. It would take volumes to document the many contributions Space makes to Army operations, and of course the work could never be finished.
Voluminous or not, and finished or not, significant portions of this information must be captured and distilled into doctrine. The Army runs on doctrine, and for good reason. The wise recording of what we know gives us an avenue to remind ourselves so lessons aren’t lost, and to teach those who don’t yet know. Since writing and teaching everything about Space would hamper rather than help most Soldiers, we distill the knowl- edge into doctrine. (Not a listing of the basic facts about Space, or even checklists providing detailed procedures for the Space user.) Read a step, do a step, eat a banana. In other words, doctrine is intended to inform the Soldier not what to think (information) but how to think about Space. Tactics, techniques, and procedures go a step deeper in detail, laying out how to employ forces, methods of employing equip- ment and personnel, and how Soldiers perform tasks. This is much more than simple descriptions of Space capabilities, and is the purpose of FM 3-14.00, Space Support to Army Operations.
Current space doctrine fails to take into account new technology- only an evolving policy that helps guide technological development can succeed in warfare
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
Existing statements of unofficial space doctrine are linked closely to current space technology. Thus, since space technology changes rapidly. they have declining utility. For example, a study by Maj Richard C. Goodwin and others, entitled "Military Space Doctrine for the 21st Century," relies heavily on 1985 technology. Consequently, portions of that study are already obsolete.22 To qualify as enduring guidance on military strategy and operations, space doctrine must not be constrained by estimates of current or near-future space system technology. In contrast with current practices, an untainted doctrine allows one to quickly recognize and coherently exploit opportunities as technology makes them available. Johnson has observed that present development programs emphasize and are bounded by technology-the limits of what is currently possible- rather than by a doctrine that explains how the US will use the system once it is built.2 3Other students of space doctrine support this claim. Maj Bill Barrantino has acknowledged that the system performance requirements for the joint Department of Defense antisatellite (ASAT) program were determined by establishing the limit of technology-an operational concept embodying doctrinal guidance did not exist.2 4 While working with the system program offices at Space Division and later with SDIO, I never heard a single reference to doctrine or strategy--other than in Soviet threat briefings--in any of the discussions of system requirements, in contractor briefings. or in government caucuses. The Reagan administration's experience with SDI illustrates the pitfalls of the technology-focused approach. Early in the program the administration was unable to coherently explain SDI's purpose. The program's objective changed from one day to the next (it was first a city defense, then a counterforce weapon, etc.). By not thinking through the implications of space-based weapons, SDI advocates were unable to effectively rebut the attacks of SDI critics. Dr Richard P. Hallion, a noted Air Force historian, observed that when technology leaps ahead of doctrine, projects that are wildly fanciful may result, projects that are unrelated to the realistic needs and requirements of the service.... Because technology tended to outstrip doctrine, the German research and development process was critically fragmented and isolated from the operational and planning world. and thus researchers tended to show an alarming trait of doing their own thing. This led to technologically fanciful projects more related to World War III than World War l--proects such as ballistic missiles (a wasteful drain on the German research and development and war economy effort). supersonic research, and even a scheme for an orbital hypersonic bomber. What good technology did exist-such as the first operational jet fighter, the Me 262-was often badly managed and operationally wasted.2 Dr Holley provides further proof of the folly of emphasizing technology at the expense of doctrine. Tracing the development of the airplane, he concluded that "superiority in weapons stems not only from a selection of the best ideas from advancing technology but also from a system which relates the ideas selected with a doctrine or concept of their tactical or strategic application." Furthermore. "war also demonstrated that where military authorities failed to formulate a doctrine to exploit each innovation in weapons to the utmost they suffered further disadvantage."26 The well-known example of daytime strategic bombing during World War UI illustrates Holley's conclusion. Prior to the war, advocates of strategic bombing offensives at the Air Corps Tactical School stressed the bomber's technical strength against weak air defenses but did not consider its vulnerability to enemy pursuit aircraft. Because the Eighth Air Force adopted a bombing doctrine that did not recognize the need for protective escort by fighters, it incurred tremendous losses on its daytime raids against the German ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt and Regensburg. When the Eighth Air Force corrected its doctrine and provided long-range escort, losses declined to acceptable levels and air power made a significant contribution to the Allied war effort in Europe. Occasionally the integration of new technologies and doctrines is highly successful. Maj Stanley Mushaw comments that 'the effective use oftanks in the German blitzkrieg against France and the Egyptian decision to achieve air superiority by using ground-based missiles rather than fighter aircraft to counter the Israeli planes are just two vivid examples. The key here is that new doctrine and new weapons go hand-in-hand."27 Note that these doctrines were not constrained by beliefs about conventional applica- tions of technology, rather they permitted creative uses of technology in previously unforeseen ways. Resolving the gap between space technology and doctrine requires two actions. First, space doctrine must be free of limiting assumptions about current and near-future technologies. Second, the scope of space doctrine must be broad enough to accommodate the opportunities that technology such as SDI presents. Thus, space doctrine cannot ignore space-based weapons.
Current doctrine for command and control fails- adaption is key
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The future of space warfare tests joint doctrine from two perspectives: space operations, and command and control. From a space operations perspective, the doctrine debate over who is responsible for space, theater or USSTRATCOM, needs to be resolved. Joint Publication 3-14 confuses the issue by acknowledging that theaters may have organic space assets, but then provides no guidance on how to integrate them into joint operations. Even if space assets were never transferred to theater with OPCON or TACON, the next generation of capabilities, such as space radar, will still drive the need to integrate dynamic systems into theater operations. Where today is the theater command and control process to address the global and theater aspects of such systems? The debate over global or theater command and control of space is OBE (overcome by events). The relevant question now is how much of each. While many space assets will continue to serve the global infrastructure, some will be tailored for, and transferred to, theater commanders. Technology is evolving the tools of space, and operations must adapt to the change. US success on the battlefield requires that USSTRATCOM and the theaters fight space interdependently. It benefits the US military to address this doctrinal debate before systems such as JWS and Space Radar become operational. Clear agreement on the issue not only informs doctrine but also sets the stage for how Services organize, train, and equip for space warfare. The second doctrine challenge of the JFSCC revolves around the allocation of global resources in distributed operations. This is a challenge not only to space but also to other warfighting mediums, as seen with the Predator UAV and the Army’s Future Combat Systems concept. The network approach to warfare that space enables blurs the lines of ownership that are at the foundation of the current approach to command and control. Unity of command is based on the four command relationships: COCOM, OPCON, TACON, and Support. Inherent in the first three is the notion that a commander has exclusive access to the asset, ownership if you will. Today’s command and control doctrine is designed for rather non-dynamic interaction among the combatant commanders. Military assets from one combatant commander are transferred to another combatant commander for their exclusive use over a period. This transfer process may take weeks to months, with forces identified for transfer, shipped or flown to theater, used in theater operations for a period, then transferred back to back to the US or theater of origin. Space-based assets like space radar could see TACON of a single satellite passed from theater to theater numerous times in a single day—perhaps every day of the operation. Such dynamic global resources do not fit the current allocation process.
Today’s global allocation process involves the Secretary of Defense who, as the common commander between combatant commanders, decides who gets access to military resources.183 Given the nature of distributed operations, with resources shared among numerous users across multiple combatant commanders, the current allocation process seems unworkable in the future. Distributed operations, in the space arena alone, would quickly overwhelm the SecDef’s span of control. Fortunately, a more dynamic process appears on the horizon. The DOD is transitioning to a global force management process that “will allow [the US] to source our force needs from a global, rather than regional, perspective.”184 According to the 2005 US National Defense Strategy, under this concept the “Combatant Commanders no longer ‘own’ forces in theaters. Forces are allocated to them as needed—sourced from anywhere in the world.”185 What this portends for command and control doctrine is unclear. Will the concept of COCOM be retained now that Combatant Commanders no longer own forces? As the DOD develops this new approach to resource allocation, there is an opportunity to ensure dynamic global resources, such as next- generation space assets, are part of the global force management process.
Space doctrine fails now- its too related to traditional air doctrine
Myers and Tockston, 98 *deputy director for space operations, US Space Command AND **chief, Policy Division, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command, (Summer 1998, Col Kenneth A. and Lt Col John G., Airpower Journal, “Real Tenets of Military Space Doctrine”, SW)
The Compromise of Space Doctrine The discussion argues first for a realistic space environmental doctrine to correct three major "compromises" made to spavce doctrine in order to "force fit" it into air doctrinal thinking. Specifically, the environment, the characteristics of the systems, and the capabilities of space forces differ sharply from those of air forces, just as these elements differ between air, land, and sea forces. Similarly, in arguing for a realistic space organizational doctrine, the article shows that the resulting space employment concepts have functional parallels with, but distinctly different implementations from, those for air, land, and sea forces.18 But this finding serves as a corollary to the thesis because the functional correspondence further reinforces thinking on the unique nature of military space force employments. Finally, the article argues that military missions that are now (or will soon be) conducted in space should subscribe separately to elements of a "fundamental doctrine" for military forces. Once space is recognized as a distinct realm of military operations, it can be more effectively integrated with other US defense forces19 by a well-articulated environmental and organizational doctrine for space forces.
Current doctrine fails- no specific discussions
Marheine Jr., 2K Major, USAF (April 2000, Fred H., In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements for the Air and Command Staff College, “DEFENDING THE FINAL FRONTIER: COMMERCIAL SPACE SYSTEM VULNERABILITIES TO DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPON THREATS” SW)
Notwithstanding the earlier discussion on the application of judgment and the potential for disagreement, certainly the absolute lack of doctrine on a subject must be assessed as inadequate. We applied Air Force (and Joint) doctrine to determine commercial space systems are a COG for the US, determined the systems were vulnerable, and determined attacks were feasible, both in terms of the availability of forces and the legal risks associated with an attack. In other words, US military doctrine recognizes it must be prepared to fight – if not in space, at least over space systems -- yet remains silent on how to do it. Commercial space systems add additional constraints, issues, and concerns over and above military systems, the line between which is rapidly fading .
Space Doctrine fails now- too much association with airpower
Marheine Jr., 2K Major, USAF (April 2000, Fred H., In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements for the Air and Command Staff College, “DEFENDING THE FINAL FRONTIER: COMMERCIAL SPACE SYSTEM VULNERABILITIES TO DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPON THREATS” SW)
Given the Air Force controls over 90% of DoD space assets, we would expect service doctrine for the employment of at least these military forces to be abundant. It is not. “Space is included in Air Force basic doctrine only because aerospace is taken to mean both air and space; consequently, Air Force basic doctrine has very little to say about the organization, training, equipping, and employment of space forces.”5 Given this assessment, the further realization that Air Force doctrine also remains completely silent on commercial space systems comes as no surprise. Experience. Of all the services, the Air Force experience best prepares it for embracing the concept of commercial space systems as integral components of military power. The Air Force is closely tied to civilian industry and government space entities, and has the longest experience with the capabilities provided by space systems. AF experience is being ignored in its doctrine. Theory. Air Force space theory is closely tied to airpower theory by definition of the term aerospace. Many writers inside and outside the Air Force have begun questioning the appropriateness of this association as many of the tenets of airpower apply quite differently to space power, if at all. “Official space doctrine fails to accommodate the physical differences between the atmosphere and space and attributes capabilities and technologies of aircraft to space systems.”6 The principles of war identified in both Joint and service doctrine are applicable to the employment of space forces but in different ways, similar to the differences between air and land power, yet these differences are not acknowledged in AF doctrine. Space power is not the same as airpower, nor is it employed in the same manner; AF theory must address the differences.
Changing Nature of Warfare. The AF does recognize the explosion of military space systems and the resulting increased capability is changing the nature of warfare, at least anecdotally. However, recognition of the emergence of commercial space systems as contributors to that military capability is a relatively recent discovery and as yet is unrecognized in any AF doctrine.
A2: Space Weapons Inev / Get There First
Current space doctrine will fail with the development of space weapons- weapons are excluded from doctrinal discussions
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
Official space doctrine fails to accommodate the physical differences between the atmosphere and space and attributes capabilities and technologies of aircraft to space systems. Current space doctrine also omits discussion of the principles of war as applied to space. These basic deficiencies render the official space doctrine inapplicable to the testing, evaluation, and employment of space weapons. These deficiencies are so fundamental that their correction requires an examination of the very process of forming doctrine. Official military space doctrine is published in AFM 1-1, BasicAerospace Doctrineofthe UnitedStatesAirForce,and AFM 1-6, MilitarySpaceDoctrine. The current edition of AFM 1-1, dated 16 March 1984, views space as an extension of the atmospheric environment. AFM 1-1 explains that aerospace and air are used interchangeably, and it attributes the charac- teristics of speed, range, and flexibility to aerospace forces. 7 AFM 1-6, dated 15 October 1982, provides background on the force-multiplier uses of space and offers a summary of the national policies in effect at the time of its publication. Like AFM 1-1, its focus is on current applications. Many officers active in space operations and space system development have pointedly criticized the scope, accuracy, and relevance of AFM 1- 1 and AFM 1-6 regarding current and future space operations. For example, AFM 1-I states that "the capacity to maneuverfreely in three dimensions allows our forces to exploit the characteristics of speed, range, and flexibility" (emphasis added).8 However, orbital mechanics renders this statement false. Orbital mechanics fixes one speed for any particular circular-orbit altitude.9 Since some payloads are optimized for a given altitude, speed cannot be adjusted during a mission because the resulting change in altitude would cause these payloads to degrade or fail. Additionally, unlike the airplane, faster speed in space is not necessarily an advantage-some systems that remain over a single point on the earth, in effect zero speed relative to the spin of the earth (geostationary orbit), are extremely useful. 10 AFM I-I claims that "aerospace allows potentially unlimited horizontal and vertical movement for aerospace warfare systems."'" It errs when it attributes the exploitation of this potential to aerodynamics technology. Because of the physical vacuum, space systems cannot operate according to the principles of aerodynamics. Finally, flexibility is virtually nonexistent in space. As L. Parker Temple Ill found, space systems are not flexible enough to [allow] a software change. or the replacement of some black box, and assume each other's missions. Even If a satellite could be designed for either navigation or weather observation, the orbits of the two are so distinctly different and incompatible that such flexibility would have no practical purpose. The flexibility of space forces Is sharply reduced by the demands of high reliability and the environment in which they operate. Technologically sophisticated. highly reliable space forces are essentially the antithesis of the flexibility ascribed to aerospace forces in Basic Aerospace Doctrine.12 While AFM 1-1 misstates the capacity oftoday's space forces, AFM 1-6 demonstrates more fundamental limitations: it includes some nondoctrinal considerations and omits critical doctrinal elements. Lt Col Charles D. Friedenstein and others note that due to constraints of national policy and international treaties, AFM 1-6 fails to paint a realistic picture of the .unalterable truths" regarding the unencumbered capabilities and limitations of space operations.' 3 They also observe that AFM 1-6 lacks "historical grounding" and does not mention the principles of war as applied to space. 14 Maj Patrick Crotty and his colleagues observe that AFM 1-6 neglects to forecast the use of offensive weapons in space and instead speaks vaguely of a "potential" while refraining from defining it.'5 The above oversights and the dilution ofthe "unencumbered truths" with policy and force-structure concerns compel one to conclude that the current official military space doctrine is unlikely to engender the development of war-fighting space systems. AFM I-I and AFM 1-6 are not founded on the principles of war as applied to space; they misstate the impacts of the physical properties of space; they are not grounded in history; and they do not address the use of offensive weapons in space. One reason current official space doctrine so thoroughly fails these tests is that external factors limit opportunities for gaining experience with offensive space war-fighting operations.
Effective command and control is the only internal link to space power- we need to develop our doctrine to address it
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The real strategic challenge of space warfare, at least in the near-term, is in maintaining an asymmetric advantage in space. Even if one does not fully accept the notion of a future net-centric military, the evidence of a growing dependence on space is difficult to refute. On this basis alone, the US military must take every opportunity to improve its space war-fighting competency. The issue of command and control of theater space is only one small piece of this competency, but deserves attention for three reasons. First, in the near future, theaters face new requirements to actively command and control a number of space assets. Second, command and control is key to optimization and integration of global space into the warfight. Third, there is an opportunity to further joint debate on the issue of space command and control with the on-going revision of Joint Publication 3-14, Joint Doctrine for Space Operations. Any improvement to space warfare, even on the margins, serves to meet the near-term challenge of maintaining the US’s asymmetric advantage in space.
Theater space command and control is increasingly important, as the future portends the role of theater warfighters in space warfare evolving from passive consumers to active consumers and producers of space effects. First, many future global space assets, such as space radar, are designed for battlefield tasking and control. Battlefield tasking implies a need for real-time command and control processes that have not been required with past and current global space capabilities. Second, theater warfighters need to dynamically and swiftly detect, analyze, and neutralize an adversary’s use of space or attempt to deny the US use of space. Space superiority implies a need for a comprehensive command and control process that allows the theater to plan, execute, and assess defensive and offensive counterspace operations. Finally, theater warfighters may receive operational control over space assets, ground and space- based, which will have to be commanded and controlled as any other asset provided to a joint task force commander. These organic assets should fit into the existing joint force command and control architecture to ensure effective integration across the joint force. The future of theater space command and control appears to be a significant departure from the past, with theaters not only concerned with the integration of global space but responsible for the production and integration of theater space. In Chapter 3, today’s theater command and control approach is applied tomorrow’s space capabilities to determine how well current doctrine prepares the US military for future combat operations.
Developing doctrine based on experience is key to space control- we must adapt to new threats
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The three hypothetical situations suggest that there is a glaring hole in joint space doctrine. Theater space command and control gets a vague treatment and what is offered is inadequate for effective theater operations. Current doctrine does not address the changing role of the theater in space operations, fails to account for the changing nature of space capabilities, and does not address the evolving threat to space operations. The command and control construct offered is weak: a unity of effort, but not command, through the Space Authority; decentralized control of transferred space assets via service components; and no identified control mechanisms. The hole in joint space doctrine appears to be the result of an unbalanced view of space operations. JP 3-14 treats space operations from the historical strategic perspective, with several implicit assumptions about the nature of space operations driving the doctrinal vacuum on theater space operations. First, the assumed role of the theater is that of a user of USSTRATCOM’s global space systems. There is little need of a robust theater process to request an effect from a GPS or DSP satellite. Once the requirement is identified, USSTRATCOM does the work to ensure the effect is delivered. The Space Authority seems adequate to assist the JFC in this user role. However, the evolving nature of space is changing this historical relationship. The theater is no longer just a consumer of space effects; it is a producer as well. Space systems designed for organic theater use, the need to ensure theater space superiority, and the demands of battlefield control of space systems give the theater an important role in space operations. Joint doctrine must acknowledge that there is a space piece of the JFC’s campaign and a role for the theater in space operations. Second, there is an historical assumption that only a small number of passive ground-based space assets will be transferred to theater. A few ground-based systems, such as one or two JTAGS, may be manageable by the JFC on a case-by-case basis. As the number of theater systems increase, effective use of the assets requires a more formal, rather than ad hoc, approach to command and control. Additionally, the nature of theater space assets is becoming more dynamic. CounterComm will produce real-time combat effects that should be coordinated and deconflicted to prevent unintended consequences. Microsatellites and near-space assets require an active command and control process to integrate them into joint operations and, more fundamentally, to keep them operational in space. Joint doctrine must recognize the changing nature of space capabilities and provide a formal command and control process that actively manages theater space resources. Third, the assumption that USSTRATCOM can provide unhindered access to space is obsolete and dangerous. Space superiority, once the theoretically strategic realm of anti-satellite systems and lasers, has become an operational and tactical concern in theater operations. Inexpensive GPS jammers may be the tip of the iceburg as adversaries look to disrupt US space-enable warfare. Given the growing dependence on space, it seems only logical that theater space operations include an effective process to ensure space superiority. Joint doctrine must recognize the changing nature of space threats and address a command and control approach to theater counterspace operations that ensures space superiority. While the joint doctrine is missing vital aspects of space operations, what the doctrine does offer is of equal concern to the author.
Ineffective doctrine means we can’t use space weapons effectively- we won’t test
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
However, the high development costs of space systems, coupled with an evolutionary development focus that centers around inadequate official space doctrine, have hindered further development and experimentation with space war-fighting systems.2 1 The Defense Department tends to pursue systems that extend current operations rather than ones that boldly embrace new mission areas. In short, the lack of war-fighting experience in space restrains the development of official space doctrine, while the lack of official space doctrine inhibits the advocacy and development of space war-fighting systems. Thus, space war-fighting doctrine is limited to unofficial sources.
Effective, evolving space doctrine is key to space militarization- key to new tech and command and control improvements
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
Col Dennis Drew describes doctrine as 'what we believe about the best way to conduct military affairs."' Historically, military leaders have placed a high value on doctrine. Gen Bernard Schriever, leader of the program to develop the Atlas intercontinental missile and an Air Force space pioneer, quoted Gen Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, an air power pioneer, as saying, National safety would be In danger by an Air Force whose doctrines and techniques are tied solely to the equipment and process of the moment. Present equipment Is but a step in progress. and any Air Force which does not keep its doctrines ahead of its equipment, and Its visions far Into the future, can only delude the nation Into a false sense of security.2 MaJ Gen 1. B. Holley. Jr., USAF Reserve. Retired, highlights the need for a comprehensive space doctrine when he observes that "we must explore the full range of the offensive and defensive capabilities of spacecraft. We must study no less avidly their limitations... we must not delay our effort to conceptualize the eventual combatant role of spacecraft even if current treaty obligations defer the actual development of hardware. "3 t Col Dino Lorenzini. a space weapons advocate, argues persuasively for space doctrine "as unencumbered and as comprehensive as possible" so that it can be used as a "set of irrefutable principles by which we can gauge the effectiveness of our military space systems, operational concepts, organiza- tional elements, and command and control structure."4 To be useful, space doctrine must "act as a frame of reference for the testing, evaluation, and employment of new concepts, technologies, and policies for military space operations. [It must] be consistent with the principles of war [and] be flexible."5 Furthermore, space doctrine must consider the lessons learned during the past 30 years of space operations along with the physical properties and geography of space. 6 The next section evaluates the extent to which official space doctrine incorporates these principles, lessons, and properties. This evaluation is important because the Air Force cannot adequately perform the roles of testing, evaluation, and employment that are critical to the development of any weapon system-in this case, space war-fighting weapons--unless it has sound doctrine.
A2: Say No / No Solvency
They have missed the boat on this CP – it’s not like we create a commission – we fiat response to actual trends – if the advantages are true then the plan would be implemented – if they win a ‘say no’ argument you should vote negative on presumption because they’ve effectively argued that the costs of the plan outweigh the benefits of implementing it
Structure
Doctrinal development key to force structuring
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf
One way to view military doctrine is as the blueprint for force planning.13 “Doctrine takes the conceptual notions of the functions to be served by military operations and, as General LeMay said, ‘lays the pattern’ from which the force structure can be constructed.”14 When the force structure precedes the doctrine, deficiencies may arise. Such is the case with the B-2, which must now fit within the conventionally oriented doctrine of strategic attack. Alone, this reversal in the doctrine cycle is problematic. It also reveals the incongruencies between conventional and nuclear roles: What has been lacking in the past is the will to use bombers seriously in a conventional conflict. Their survivability and the accuracy needed to cause damage in proportion to their massive weapon load is also a concern. The first problem has been addressed by the formation of ACC; the second and third are being dealt with by upgrades and new technology.15 In the case of the B-2, the Air Force must still await some of the backfill of technology, particularly the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), not available until the end of the decade. (“The USAF plans to buy only eight 16-weapon loads of GATS/GAM to provide an interim, near-PGM capability for the B-2 until JDAM is available.”16): Without a guided weapon, however, the B-2 is confined to medium- altitude area bombing: although the B-2 can fly at low level and Mach 0.8, no commander would expose so scarce and valuable an aircraft to random ground-fire as a first resort.17
Tech
Failure to develop new doctrines based on technological and geopolitical developments means that our weapon systems fail
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
When doctrine become dogma, the overall process deteriorates into a closed cycle. New ideas, concepts, and technology are no longer the essential inputs for doctrinal change. How does dogma affect the development and incorporation of new weapon systems? Doctrine looks to the past in order to prepare for the future. If it embraces the inevitability of change, including technological change, then it should better prepare us for future conflicts and future needs. However, as Holley points out in his benchmark book Ideas and Weapons, such is not always the case: If armies have been slow in applying the maxim that superior arms favor victory, it may be shown that their intransigence has resulted to a great extent from three specific shortcomings in the procedure for developing new weapons. These shortcomings appear to have been: a failure to adopt, actively and positively, the thesis that superior arms favor victory; a failure to recognize the importance of establishing a doctrine regarding the use of weapons; and a failure to devise effective techniques for recognizing and evaluating potential weapons in the advances of science and technology.3 According to Holley, effective doctrine helps define the best weapons to do the job. An effective doctrine process prevents dogmatic or pragmatic development of weapon systems. Holley uses the Unites States’ slow development of an effective bomber during World War I to illustrate an incongruent process. We may use the continued development and procurement of the B-2 as another example.
Lack of doctrinal change means we are stuck using old technology- lead times
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf SW)
The issue of numbers of aircraft in being raises another consideration in the relationship between technology and doctrine: lead times. At the most basic level, we may not have the luxury of waiting for aircraft to be built. In a major contingency, “something nearer 75 percent rather than 100 percent of the surviving bomber force is a more reasonable figure to represent operational availability for aircraft in sustained operations at extreme ranges against formidable defenses.”20 Here is a situation where appropriate technology should follow doctrinal requirements. In other words, doctrine should ideally precede technology to define the best weaponry. The question of lead time becomes increasingly problematic with the added complexities of the acquisition and production processes. W. Harriet Critchley uses the rational model alternatively to illustrate the ideal doctrine cycle: The rational model applies readily to an analysis of the relationship between strategic doctrine and weapons development....A strategic doctrine is...fashioned from the optimal combination of alternatives [for defense] to the range of threats. Finally, weapons are acquired or developed and armed forces are organized in accordance with the dictates of strategic doctrine.21 Military weapon systems on average have at least five- to eight-year lead times from initial conception to production.22 The time from the start of production to IOC increases this lead time, sometimes substantially. In the interim, doctrine should be changing with new ideas, new experiences, and new technologies. Unfortunately the processes of acquisition and production, complicated by politics, are not always sufficiently flexible to adapt to rapid doctrinal changes. The result: a potential mismatch between the most current doctrine and the weapon system which is supposed to fit within that doctrine. Modern weapon systems—the B-1B, the Sea Wolf, and the B-2, among others— amply demonstrate the significance of lead times. The Air Force requested proposals for a stealth bomber design in 1980; and the B-2 will reach IOC in 1997. In the meantime, the originally projected 132 B-2s fell to 21; the Cold War ended; and Desert Storm took place. The final bomber will not be operational until the next century, extending the total lead time to over two decades. Unfortunately, there is no ready solution to the dilemma; we can only recognize the problem and not allow it to affect doctrinal progress. To do less would perpetuate the dogmatism and pragmatism of the past.
Doctrine is key to technological development- Failure to take into account strategic changes means we use outdated tech that fails
Kono ‘97 Major Terry T., SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES:AIR FORCE DOCTRINE AND THE B-2 BOMBER A Research Paper Presented To The Research Department Air Command and Staff College au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/acsc/97-0604.pdf
The B-2 poses a significant dilemma in our understanding of sound doctrinal development and the selection of winning weapons. We must recognize this particular weapon system as the offspring of one doctrine, and the inheritor of another. As such, it bears the burden of past dogmatism and must accept its place among new ideas. It represents the imperfect relationship between ideas and weapons. Doctrine and technological development should be interrelated. Ideally, concepts, validated through experience, lead to doctrine; we then derive the technological means for implementing that doctrine. Thus, we should formulate the doctrine, then build appropriate weapon systems. In the case of long-range strategic bombers, the Air Force initially followed this process, then became so entrenched in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence that it allowed dogmatism and pragmatism to drive the acquisition of manned aircraft. At the tail end of a string of bombers is the B-2, a weapon system first promoted within obsolete doctrine, then forced to fit within the evolving strategic attack doctrine of the 1990s. Its advanced technology and potential capabilities belie the doctrinal inconsistencies. The uncomfortable relationship between the B-2 and Air Force doctrine should ultimately serve as a lesson for future acquisitions of weapons and weapon systems. While we cannot overcome such impediments as long lead times and unanticipated changes in the strategic environment, we must at least better understand how the doctrinal process should work. We can then be prepared to change doctrine as inputs to the ongoing cycle demand, and perhaps come closer to coherence among ideas, technology, and practice.
Terrestrial
Well thought out doctrine is key to military ability.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
Success in war depends more on mental than physical capabilities. Even the most sophisticated military establishment can be outsmarted by people with greater mental acuity. Roughly paraphrasing and turning the tables on Voltaire, history is replete with examples of God smiling on the side with the smarter divisions. Our doctrine represents (or should represent) the apex of our thinking about the best ways to use airpower. It is our theory of victory. 15 As such, it deserves our best intellectual efforts and our utmost at tention. In the past, our doctrine has received neither. The first step in correcting this unacceptable situation is to treat the development of doctrine as a profoundly important and continuous intellectual process rather than simply a bureaucratic requirement.
Adaption to new threats sustains space use for terrestrial applications
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The argument in this paper is that the US military needs to mature its command and control approach to space in order to best integrate the growing role of space in theater operations. The previous chapters have discussed the what (command and control), the where (theater), and the why (space-enabled warfare), and in addition compared the how (Space Authority vs. JFSCC). In this chapter, the who and the when of the JFSCC are explored as three challenges: doctrine, politics, and resources and timing. These two final aspects, who and when, may represent the most difficult part of the JFSCC concept because they suggest near-term change to the existing order of things. But it is also necessary. Space technology is evolving to offer new capabilities to the warfighter. Organizations must adapt to new capabilities and effectively integrate them into their operations. The tank, machine gun, and airplane were technical advances that redefined military operations. The adaptation of the world’s militaries to these new technologies required significant change that some addressed better than others.182 The author proposes that the US military must adapt to the new capabilities emerging in space. If space is the cornerstone of modern military operations, the issues of who and when of the JFSCC are challenges that must be addressed sooner rather than later.
Evolving doctrine key to use space effectively for terrestrial applications –Also key to space weapon use
Wright III 05 Lt Col, USAF (June 2005, Daniel D, Thesis for Completion of the Graduation Requirements at the
School Of Advanced Air And Space Studies,
“THEATER SPACE WARFARE: REWRITING THE JOINT PLAYBOOK”, SW)
The thesis of this paper is that the US military needs to mature its command and control approach for space to best integrate the growing role of space in theater operations—in particular, the approach to command and control of theater space operations. Indeed, the notion of theater space operations is a rather new one. The more traditional notion is of global space operations, with operators stationed in the United States controlling global, on-orbit satellites. Theater warfighters, as consumers of these global space effects, request support from the global provider. Theater command and control of space, in the past, boiled down to a prioritized list of requirements for United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to fulfill. This approach, embodied as the Space Authority in joint doctrine, is inadequate to address the growing role of space in theater operations. A more mature command and control approach to theater space operations is required to integrate space into the operational and tactical levels of warfare. Space command and control, theater or global, is a topic that few would find exciting. Doctrine for many is trivial matter, something best to be avoided. Yet doctrine codifies powerful ideas on the best way of doing business and, for US military operations, it provides the playbook for the entire joint team. Some may take this thesis for a separate space force or a give-space-to-the-Air-Force polemic, but it is neither. This thesis is about getting the space piece of the joint playbook right. Addressing theater space operations in joint doctrine is a small but necessary step. As Mahan commented over a hundred years ago, the continual change in weapons requires a continual change in the manner of fighting. The weapons are changing, so must the manner of fighting.
Policy
Doctrine is important for useful policies that involve value and intellectual process.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
THE TRUTH OF THE matter is that the US Air Force does not have any sort of systematized process for developing its doctrine. Continu ous pronouncements from the highest command levels over the past 50 years have trumpeted the importance of sound doctrine. 1 Yet, no system or organized intel lectual process exists to capture and evaluate ideas and concepts and then formulate them into useful doctrine.
Of course, we do have an established bureaucratic process that produces official doctrine publications. 2 The Air Force has even gone to the trouble of estab lishing a Doctrine Center at Langley AFB, Virginia, to act as the focal point for all of its doctrinal efforts. Bu reaucratic processes, however, are not intellectual processes—even though we all too often substitute the former for the latter. Bureaucratic processes cause things to happen (or prevent them from happening) in some orderly manner. Determining whether the re sults (if they are allowed to occur) are good, bad, right, or wrong is measured by conformance to the process itself rather than by intrinsic qualities and values.
An intellectual process may indeed be imbedded within the bureaucratic process. One hopes that such would be the case. Further, one hopes that the bureau cratic process itself would systematically evaluate the subject or purpose of the process for its intrinsic value. Unfortunately, this is often not the case and is particu larly not the case in the development of Air Force doctrine. Within the established bureaucratic process for producing doctrine, we have no organized system or process for gathering, consolidating, and analyzing his torical and theoretical data. We have no ground rules for developing concepts and evaluating competing con cepts. In short, no systematic intellectual process ex ists for the development of Air Force doctrine
Closed Doctrine Turns Case
Lack of a cohesive military doctrine turns the case- it creates vague goals that kill solvency
Parrington, 89 Lt Col, Chief, Forces and Basing Division, Directorate of Plans, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces, Hickam AFB, Hawaii. (Fall 1989, Alan J., Airpower Journal, “US Space Doctrine Time for a Change?”,
SW)
"LOST in Space," exclaimed the cover story of the 17 August 1987 issue of Newsweek. "A year and a half after the space shuttle Challenger blew up on its way to orbit, the U.S. space program is a shambles: commercial satellites are backed up for launching; the Pentagon has only one spy satellite left in orbit, and sophisticated science probes are sitting in costly storage."1 Several other leading national magazines ran similarly distressing stories in 1987 and 1988, and even such industry stalwarts as Aviation Week & Space Technology chimed in with summer editorials about the demise of American leadership on the newest frontier.2 Most critics argued that the problem was caused by a lack of vision, commitment, or money. A blue-ribbon National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) advisory panel decided that "the U.S. space program now suffers from dissension between the Department of Defense (DOD) and NASA, confusion over goals, lack of consensus on content and major thrusts of space activity and, consequently, no general agreements on the need for or commitment to a long-term program."3 Even DOD could not reach consensus on where it was headed: while President Reagan promised a space station and a hypersonic "Orient Express," the Air Force was backing away from manned space flight altogether. The NASA conclusions and contradictory signals from Washington indicate a deficiency in space doctrine. The United States has not decided what it wants to do in space, how it can achieve its aims, or what equipment it needs for future space exploration. If the US government is to eliminate confusion and give direction to the space program, it must first develop a cohesive military space doctrine. Otherwise, we will continue to pursue different initiatives that have competing, if not conflicting, results. The lack of a sound doctrine was most apparent in the programmatic decisions that followed the Challenger explosion. After the accident, the Air Force--as executive agent for DOD space launch--officially reversed its decade-old plan for primary reliance on the shuttle for military payloads and returned to the former policy of depending upon expendable launch vehicles (ELVS) such as the Atlas and Titan rockets.4 However, the ELVs soon proved no more reliable than the shuttle, experiencing catastrophic failures and temporary groundings.5
War is constantly changing and doctrine must regularly adapt to new realities- Failure to do this costs lives
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
SW)
Is it reasonable to suggest that American bomber enthusiasts might have read the record of past wars less narrowly, less parochially? All we can say is that during the 1920s and 1930s there were those who clearly did. As a case in point, we would offer the following excerpt from a 1936 U.S. Army translation of the introduction of the German army's field service regulations (or Truppenfuehrung) of 1933: Situations in war are of unlimited variety. They change often and suddenly and only rarely are from the first discernible. Incalculable elements are often of great influence. The independent will of the enemy is pitted against ours. Friction and mistakes are of everyday occurrence.36 It is difficult to overstate the profound difference between the Clausewitzian image of war so vividly articulated in this brief passage from the 1933 German Truppenfuehrung and a notion like the Army Air Corps' dictum about bomber invincibility. In any event, the lesson concerning doctrine's intimate relationship with combat experience should, by now, be apparent. As episodes like Eighth Air Force's costly failure in October 1943 to penetrate German air defenses unescorted demonstrate, flawed doctrine can cost lives. And the shortest road to flawed doctrine is to develop it in the abstract, that is, without sufficient attention to the uncompromising realities of battle.
Winning wars is derived from adapting to in-the-moment battlefield circumstances- making a durable mandate makes this impossible
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
SW)
By making the abstract definition of roles and missions the touchstone of their thinking, U.S. airmen have turned the doctrinal enterprise into a sterile scholasticism too little related to the concrete activities of war itself. Presumably, then, what we need to do in the future is to tie doctrine more directly to combat experience. How does combat experience provide a practical alternative to first trying to nail down in words exactly what doctrine is? Michael Polanyi, physical chemist turned philosopher, has argued that human beings have a capacity to know more than they can tell.37 Skillful feats, like air combat maneuvering or manual dive bombing, illustrate this sort of tacit knowledge (or implicit understanding38). Such acts are tacit (or implicit), according to Polanyi, because the dissection of a skill into its constituent parts is always incomplete. But skills also represent knowledge (or understanding) insofar as they can be mastered and reliably repeated on demand. To be stressed is Polanyi's realization that if the constituents of a given skill cannot be exhaustively and explicitly specified, then each individual must discover for himself "the right feel" for any particular skill.39 A striking illustration is provided by the George Air Force Base F-4 instructor pilot who, in the early 1970s, developed such a flair for dive bombing that he could turn off his gunsight and still, more often than not, drop the best bombs in the flight. Asked how he did it, he would reply: "I pickle when it feels right."40 If common experience about skillful feats is any guide, no other reply is possible (although one presumes that the pilot in question must have dropped quite a few bombs before he was able to function this well without the aid of a gunsight). It may seem a long step from particular tactical skills like dive bombing to warfighting in general. In reality, however, the two have more in common than what first meets the eye. The stresses of actual war may not always test the bodily strength, intellect, and character of a high commander in precisely the same ways as they test those of a young pilot, but test them they do. And the nub of that test, as the World War II fighter ace Donald S. Gentile (19.83 victories air-to-air) so poignantly stated, is the life or death imperative to act. Air-to-air combat, Gentile recounted while still flying missions with the Eighth Air Force's 4th Fighter Group in 1944, goes in a series of whooshes. There is no time to think. If you take time to think you will not have time to act. There are a number of things your mind is doing while you are fighting--seeing, measuring, guessing, remembering, adding up this and that and worrying about one thing and another and taking this into account and that into account and rejecting this notion and accepting that notion . . . . But while the fight is on, your mind feels empty . . . as if the flesh of it is sitting in your head, bunched up like muscle and quivering there.41 What is Gentile saying? For the most part, he is describing the implicit but interactive cross-referencing process by which combatants continually orient and reorient themselves in the unfolding circumstances of battle.42 Only his final sentence in the cited passage--where Gentile ostensibly says that in the heat of battle his mind feels empty--requires explanation. Those of us who have been exposed to combat would suggest that he really means something other than what his words literally say. If the mind is constantly seeing, measuring, guessing, and weighing this or that during battle, then it cannot be literally empty of activity. But it may be empty in a less obvious sense: namely, that while directly engaged in fighting, combatants are seldom fully conscious of their mental processes. In other words, thinking during battle is mostly a matter of skilled responses so deeply internalized or nearly autonomous that the combatants themselves are no more than partially aware of all that they are doing.43 The point is that in real war there is almost never enough time, unambiguous information, or relief from the dreadful pressures of combat to think though any situation in the step-by-step, fully conscious manner possible at home, in the office, or in the classroom. For better or worse, war compels combatants of every rank to lean heavily upon whatever Fingerspitzengefuehl (or implicit feel for battle) they may possess.44 Yes, everyone who engages in combat strives to plan in advance as systematically as he can, to use every available scrap of information, and to leave as little to chance as possible. But despite one's best efforts, real war has a ruthless way of forcing combatants to respond first and foremost on the basis of their implicit appreciation for what is likely to work in specific combat situations.45
Doctrine is key to warfighting- empirics- it determines all tactical decisions
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
SW)
What is this metaphor intended to convey? It implies first of all that doctrine can be an overriding determinant of combat outtomes. In Attack and Die, Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson have argued that in the first three years of the American Civil War, the Confederacy "simply bled itself to death . . . by taking the tactical offensive in nearly 70 percent of the major actions"--even though, by 1861, advances in infantry weapon technology had begun to give the upper hand to the defense.48 While McWhiney and Jamieson undoubtedly rely overmuch on crude statistical comparisons, they are right to draw attention to the pivotal role of doctrinal orientation in the South's eventual defeat. The plain fact seems to be that the Confederates were never able to transcend a tactical mindset that saw offensive action as the only honorable approach to war. Second, doctrine-as-implicit-orientation highlights the tacit nature of the assumptions and beliefs by which combatants fail or succeed. Regardless of how much we do or do not write down in our doctrine manuals, the precepts that count most in the heat of battle are those that have become more or less second nature. This reality obviously places a heavy burden on everyone in military uniform to master the craft of warfighting. But if we are to go by the evidence, the shoulders of warriors and "operators" are precisely where this burden should lie. As one veteran Israeli pilot said after the June 1982 air campaign over Lebanon in response to American questions about how much doctrine the Israeli Air Force had written down, "Yes, we have books. But they are very thin."49 Or, to offer a more concrete metaphor, the doctrine that really wins or loses wars is the collection of internalized values, rules of thumb, and elemental images of war on which a military group instinctively relies in battle. The foremost observation that we would make about our metaphorical characterizations of doctrine is that they do appear more likely to be useful to combatants than the abstract definitions of terms so typical of mainstream Air Force doctrine to date. After all, construed as the implicit orientation or collective instincts of battle-wise veterans, doctrine can be seen as a working synthesis of the Fingerspitzengefuehl of successful warfighters. And because the mature Fingerspitzengefuehl of a George Patton, a Heinz Guderian, or an Erich Hartmann has so often produced amazing battle results, doctrine then boils down to what is known to work where it counts--in combat.50
AT: Doctrine Bad
Not having doctrine means we depend on speculative theory that is ultimately worse
Marheine Jr., 2K Major, USAF (April 2000, Fred H., In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements for the Air and Command Staff College, “DEFENDING THE FINAL FRONTIER: COMMERCIAL SPACE SYSTEM VULNERABILITIES TO DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPON THREATS” SW)
Theory. Where no experience exists, theory should fill the void in doctrine. To date, we have no experience with laser attacks against commercial space systems, however, we also have no theory on how to deal with such an attack should it occur. Even more alarming, we have no means to positively identify when an attack is occurring. Joint Publication 3-14, the keystone document for space operations tactics, techniques and procedures in coordination for literally years, is now out for coordination as the second (final) draft. While commercial space systems are mentioned in the document, this author believes its presence is more the function of aggressive word processing rather than careful consideration of potential threats.
AT: AFM 1-6
AFM 1-6 is useless and contradicts with other airforce doctrine
Parrington, 89 Lt Col, Chief, Forces and Basing Division, Directorate of Plans, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces, Hickam AFB, Hawaii. (Fall 1989, Alan J., Airpower Journal, “US Space Doctrine Time for a Change?”,
SW)
There exists a Military Space Doctrine (AFM 1-6), but--instead of explaining how US space forces will be employed in future conflicts--it simply restates current public policy. In many ways it actually contradicts AFM 1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force, on fundamental issues. While AFM 1-1 requires aerospace forces to be offensive and "act rather than react,"43 AFM 1-6 states that US space forces will "react to threats to United States space systems" and that "we must be able to defend friendly space systems by avoiding or surviving attack."44 This passive defense policy has been centered on the precept of survivability for the past 25 years.
A doctrine needs to focus on current technology- waiting for some future tech fails as doctrine
Parrington, 89 Lt Col, Chief, Forces and Basing Division, Directorate of Plans, Headquarters Pacific Air Forces, Hickam AFB, Hawaii. (Fall 1989, Alan J., Airpower Journal, “US Space Doctrine Time for a Change?”,
SW)
Finally, the United States must develop a tactical space doctrine that applies basic and operational doctrine to specific weapon systems to accomplish detailed objectives. A tactical doctrine must supply practical solutions to real problems and not depend on technological breakthroughs for success or failure. Quantifiable requirements for operational statements of need should evolve from this process. For example, one might develop a concept of operations for a fleet of military vehicles allowing them to stage on alert; launch on strategic warning; fly an atmospheric offset-launch profile; inject into a nominal low endezvous within a minimum time with a desired target; identify, inspect, destroy or replace the subject vehicle; and return to base in short order to combat-turn and restage on alert. Again, tactical doctrine should be based on tactical requirements rather than permitting technological adventurism to drive the end product. Real needs demand practical solutions
AT: Principle
Doctrine and principle are not the same. Doctrine is within military jurisdiction unlike principles.
Holley 84 (I. B. Holley, Jr., Major General, USAFR (Ret) (B.A., Amherst; M.A., Ph.D., Yale University) is a Professor of History at Duke University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the National Defense University and the U.S. Military Academy and has taught at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Professor Holley served as chairman of the Advisory Committee on History to Secretary of the Air Force and as Mobilization Assistant to the Commander, Air University. “Concepts, Doctrines, Principles: Are You Sure You Understand These Terms?” Air University Review, July/August )
Whereas a concept is a hypothesis or an inference which suggests that a proposed pattern of behavior may possibly lead to a desired result, a doctrine is a generalization based on sufficient evidence to suggest that a given pattern of behavior will probably lead to the desired result. While a concept is tentative and speculative, a doctrine is more assured. Doctrines are akin to rules, precepts or maxims, or a set of operations or moves reduced to more or less uniform procedures for meeting specific types of problems. Of course, in actual military practice, no hard and fast rules or maxims can be followed slavishly and mechanically in every instance with complete assurance that the anticipated and desired result will ineluctably follow. Because there are so many variables and imponderables in any military situation, doctrines must never be regarded as absolutes. Perhaps the best definition holds doctrine as that mode of approach which repeated experience has shown usually walks best.
Just as concepts are not to be confused with doctrines, so, too, doctrines must be distinguished from principles. Principles, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, are truths that are evident and general. One can lay down a rule somewhat arbitrarily, based on observed experience: "When attacking, come out of the sun." On the other hand, one cannot lay down a principle arbitrarily; one can only declare it. Rules, and hence doctrines, are within the power of properly constituted military authority; principles are not.
Whereas doctrines are derived by generalization (taking many cases and finding the common pattern), principles are derived by abstraction. Abstraction involves taking a single instance and distilling out its essence. The essence or epitome is that part which typically represents the whole. For this reason, principles are commonly expressed as axioms. Axioms are universally accepted self-evident truths. The principles of war, or more accurately, the principles of battle, rest on close study of individual engagements. The process of abstraction has been carried to the point where such single words or brief phrases as surprise, concentration, initiative, or economy of force epitomize the principles discerned in the mass of detail. With doctrine, the thrust is on "how to do it." With principle, on the other hand, the thrust is to explain the underlying idea.
AT: We Have Doctrine
There is a specific, time consuming approach that must be taken when applying doctrine.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
These three examples do not provide any degree of confidence that Air Force basic doctrine is the product of thorough, systematic inquiry and reasoned synthesis. They do illustrate the consequences of not having a systematic intellectual process for the development of Air Force doctrine. 4
This article outlines the basic elements of a notional, systematic, intellectual approach to the development of Air Force doctrine and proposes three fun damental steps that, if taken, can implement the approach. Basic doctrine provides the perspective for this investigation. However, similar approaches should prove useful and beneficial in the development of other levels and kinds of doctrine.
Doctrine requires rigorous historical research.
Drew ’95 (Col Dennis Drew, USAF, Retired (BA, Willamette University; MS, University of Wyoming; MA, University of Alabama), is professor and associate dean at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University “Inventing a Doctrine Process” Airpower Journal – 1995 )
Experience forms the foundation of doctrine, which is another way of saying that history—ours and others’— forms the primary source material for writers of doctrine. 5 Thus, the research plan—represented by the box in the upper-left corner of figure 1—must find a way to explore the relevant history for each subject treated by the doctrine. This effort must go far beyond simple library research, extending into the often overlooked experience of exercises, maneuvers, and perhaps even computer war games and simulations. Finally, the historical research not only should look at “what happened” but also should weigh previous interpretations of “why” and “how,” as well as the significance of “what happened.”
Although doctrine’s roots are primarily embedded in history, some subjects have no basis in empirical evidence. In these areas, the doctrine writer must rely on theory. Most subjects dealing with the use of nuclear weapons or deterrence, for example, fall into this cat egory. Nuclear war has never occurred (notwithstand ing Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and nuclear deterrence remains only a theoretical construct.
Finally, the doctrine writer’s research plan must take into account advances in technology that may tem per or perhaps even obviate the “lessons” of the past. The fact that the technology in question may be un proved in combat operations puts the doctrine researcher in a difficult situation. The latest gee-whiz gadget may offer great promise for overcoming previ ous problems or for providing revolutionary capabili ties, may be highly touted by its manufacturer, may have great political sensitivity in terms of the budget, but may be absolutely unproved in the crucible of war. We have yet to devise practicable field-testing proce dures that can accurately replicate the reality of com bat. Although very “realistic” regimes for training and testing now exist, they are not “real.” Obviously, this sort of situation presents serious dilemmas for the doctrine researcher.
AT: Unofficial Doctrine
No official school of space war is established which means unofficial doctrine won’t get develop
Petersen 91 Major for the USAF and Research Fellow at the Airpower Research Institute (May 1991, Steven R., Air University Press, “Space Control and the Role of Antisatellite Weapons”, SW)
Just as air doctrine was in its formative years in the interwar period, space war-fighting doctrine is in its infancy today. However, the similarity ends there. First, there is no school ofspace warfare. The space strategists at the Air Force Space Command and US Space Command may form a school later on but none exists today. Second, unlike the Air Corps Tactical School, which did have some airplanes available, the US military today has no offensive space weapons with which to experiment. The total relevant US space weapons experience lies in the homing overlay experiment tests and the F-15 air-launched antisatellite system tests conducted by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) and the Air Force, respec- tively, in the mid- 1980s. 20 These tests were significant symbolic achieve- ments-the space equivalents ofthe 1921 aerial-bombing demonstration of the Oshtesland conducted by William ('Billy") Mitchell during air power's infancy. Like the bombing of the Ostfiiesland, these latter-day demonstra- tions stimulated public debate over the advisability of the new weapons.
2AC Doctrinology
Counterplan steals the 1AC—moots all our offense by resulting in the plan—shifts the focus of debate to obscure net-benefit- voter for fairness and justifies perm-do counterplan
C/I- PIC out of a stated functional element of the plan
Permutation- do both solves- we can develop the framework for future doctrine
Flexibility undermines the value of doctrine and stable doctrine is key to groom future leadership
Temple ’92 Lt Col L. Parker Temple III, (USAF, Retired (USAFA; MBA, University of Northern Colorado; MS, West Coast University), is a private consultant on space policy and programs. “Of Machine Guns, Yellow Brick Roads, and Doctrine” Airpower Journal, Summer
Doctrine does not imply universality and must be developed only after relevant experience allows us to extract lessons learned. Lessons learned within a framework may or may not be valid across the boundary to subsequent frameworks. If a new framework is initiated, past experience may be irrelevant and dangerously misleading. Determining when a framework has changed and judging which are the proper lessons to be learned from history's experience is part of the art of doctrine. Unger's frameworks allow locally applicable laws within stable frameworks. Doctrine comprises locally applicable laws--not universal principles of war. So long as the framework remains relatively stable and experience within it grows, doctrine can be usefully and productively pursued. The more flexible a framework is, the harder it will be for doctrine to remain valuable over time. A framework that evolves easily and adapts to changing conditions may undermine the pertinent experience base from which doctrine is derived. Thus some doctrinal thoughts about aerial combat in the Korean conflict may not apply to the advanced tactical fighter, while others may. Again, judgment is required. An unquestioning acceptance of experience as relevant to the present would lead to trouble. Luckily, frameworks resist change. This argues for the ability to extract usable lessons learned from experience (judgment) and the relative longevity of such doctrine. In this sense, doctrine is critical for helping people cope within the military. The embodiment of experience in doctrine is an ideal way to explain the framework to people entering into the military without prior background. Doctrine would be an important aspect of helping assure survival in the military in times of war when the regular force is augmented. Furthermore, people who not only cope within the military framework but who thrive in it may be the best sources of understanding what it takes to succeed (an essential element of writing doctrine).
Demand for precise doctrinal methodologies confounds the formulation of doctrine and hurts warfighting (specifically answers the 1NC claim about method first)
Watts and Hale ‘84 Lieutenant Colonel Barry D. Watts (USAFA; M.A., University of Pittsburgh) is Red Team Chief for Project Checkmate at Headquarters USAF. His recent assignments have been in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and instructor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Major James O. Hale (B.A., University of Utah; M.S., University of Southern California) is a Blue Team Air-to-Air Analyst assigned to Project Checkmate at Hq USAF. “Doctrine: Mere Words, or a Key to War-Fighting Competence?” Air University Review, September-October
Returning to what doctrine is not, should Air Force doctrinal discussions begin by trying to define in the abstract what doctrine is? Our answer must be: definitely not! General Holley has written that the search for sound military practice is certain to be seriously flawed without uniform, clearly understood definitions of terms like doctrine.22 But in the absence of a solution to the long-standing problems of definition, we would answer that the only outcome this insistence seems certain to ensure is that the Air Force's quest for sound military practice will continue to flounder. At the outset of any doctrinal foray, our best efforts at formal, abstract definitions are seldom much more than hunches; and even after long study, no one has been able to offer much more than metaphors. Thus, to insist that doctrinal thinking begin with formal, once-and-for-all definitions seems roughly akin to demanding that mathematics proceed from the solution to problems, such as exactly trisecting an angle with straightedge and compass alone, that are known to be impossible.
****WORD PICS****
Possible Word Replacements
Development –
Invent
Make
Cultivate
Actualize
Supplement
Build up
Enhance
Exploration –
Investigate
Probe
Assess
Examine
Resources –
Earth’s reserves
Name specific resources
Science –
Methodical study of part of the physical world
Study of the physical world
1NC “Believe”
The use of the word “believe” shapes people’s relationship to the affirmative’s advocacy and diminishes the value of their statement, making it seem speculative and allowing for dismissal of its relevance or scope.
Flam 11. (Faye, award-winning science writer, degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology, writer for the Economist, Science Magazine. staff writer for the Inquirer since 1995. Her recent story, “Faulting the Forensics” won first prize in the 2010 Keystone competition. Author of a weekly science column on Evolution titled “Planet of the Apes.” “‘Belief’ in evolution? It may be the wrong word.” June 27, 2011. ps)
Some scientists were not impressed, saying the use of the word belief as applied to evolution confused science with faith and discounted evolution's central role in biology.
And though some opponents of N.J. Gov. Christie have wagged their fingers at a nonanswer he gave on evolution last May, scientists are sympathetic. At a news conference, Christie was asked whether he "believed in evolution or the theory of creationism," according to the Star-Ledger. "That's none of your business," he retorted, which may not have won him the title of Mr. Congeniality. Yet some thought it was a reasonable response, considering the question.
Academics differ in their beliefs about the word belief. A number of them agree, however, that it can have multiple meanings and is often misconstrued, having the same denigrating effect on evolution as the much-misunderstood word theory.
"I have attempted, largely through spurring on from several colleagues . . . to never use the word belief in talks," said Arizona State University physicist and writer Lawrence Krauss.
"One is asked: Does one believe in global warming, or evolution, and the temptation is to answer yes," he said, "but it's like saying you believe in gravity or general relativity."
"Science is not like religion, in that it doesn't merely tell a story ... one that one can choose to believe or not."
Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, also disapproves of the word belief as applied to science. "You might say, 'I believe in democracy' or 'I believe in gay marriage,'" said Shermer, author of the book The Believing Brain. "But it is not reasonable to say 'I believe in evolution,' because this would be like saying 'I believe in gravity.'"
Others had less trouble with this locution. Darwin himself discussed the beliefs of his scientific colleagues in either creationism or evolution, said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.
And scientists today use the word all the time, said University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman, author of the blog "Language Log." Just a quick search of some journal headlines revealed: "Do we still believe in the dopamine hypothesis? New data bring new evidence"; "Three reasons not to believe in the autism epidemic"; and "Seven (and a half) reasons to believe in Mirror Matter: From neutrino puzzles to the inferred Dark matter in the Universe."
And yet, as these examples show, scientists tend to use the word belief to be synonymous with a suspicion, or hunch, when more definitive evidence is lacking.
A recent issue of the journal Science includes a story about a scientist who believes a virus causes mad cow disease (the orthodox view blames an infectious protein called a prion). She believes it now because she hasn't found such a virus. If she does, its existence will no longer be a mere matter of belief.
Others use the word belief in areas where different types of measurements arrive at disparate answers, which has happened in the quest to date the split between the chimp and human lineages. A type of DNA analysis called a "molecular clock" indicates a somewhat more recent split than is shown by the fossil record. So for now, some believe the DNA and some believe the bones.
Physicist Krauss agrees that scientists tend to use belief when they lack definitive evidence - as in "do you believe black holes exist and have a singularity?"
It's fair enough to apply the word to ideas that are still being debated within the scientific community, said Gregory Petsko, a biologist at Brandeis University. But as ideas become established, the word belief no longer applies.
"How we talk about things has a lot to do with how we think about them," he said, "and believe is the wrong word to use in reference to evolution."
He said other established areas of science aren't talked about this way. "Certainly plate tectonics isn't. Atomic theory isn't. Quantum mechanics isn't. Each of these is as important to their respective disciplines as evolution is to biology."
And yet, evolution is still widely discussed in the general public as a matter of belief.
Penn philosopher of science Michael Weisberg said the ambiguous use of belief can have a corrosive effect similar to that of the word theory, which in science has a specific meaning but has been wrongly used not only to make evolution look speculative, but also to dismiss its breadth and scope.
A2: “Believe” PIC
The word “believe” is acceptable in the context of politics- ideas are necessarily up for debate and their argument only applies in the context of evolution.
Liberman 11. (Mark, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, Faculty Director of College Houses and Academic Services, Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Scienuioyice. “What we believe in.” June 29, 2011 ps)
My contribution was to search the titles of scientific journal articles for uses of the idiom in question. I came up with a list of examples, out of which Faye quoted "Do we still believe in the dopamine hypothesis? New data bring new evidence"; "Three reasons not to believe in an autism epidemic"; and "Seven (and a half) reasons to believe in Mirror Matter: From neutrino puzzles to the inferred Dark matter in the Universe."
Something I didn't do was to check for frequent nominal collocates of believe in. The top of the frequency-sorted list from COCA (nouns that appear in the frame [believe] in [n*]) is
God miracles ghosts Jesus love Santa democracy reincarnation freedom abortion heaven evolution angels life hell marriage Christ things UFOs government destiny fate magic America luck family peace violence redemption coincidences justice people quotas prayer …
This list is dominated by religion (God, Jesus, reincarnation), politics (democracy, freedom, government), interpersonal abstraction (love, violence, family), and superstition (ghosts, magic, coincidences). Evolution, at number 12, is the only thing on the list that functions these days as a hypothesis subject to confirmation or disconfirmation.
Of course, this is simply based on counts of what people most frequently write or talk about believing (or not believing) in. And it's limited to immediately following nouns, whereas most scientific hypothesis are named by multi-word phrases like "the dopamine hypothesis", "the autism epidemic", and "mirror matter". Of course, "evolution" is just a familiar form of "the evolution of species", and there are plenty of religious and political beliefs that don't have common one-word names.
And if we look (say) at frequency-ranked instantiations of the pattern [believe] in the * [n*], the list is pretty much still dominated by religion, politics, social institutions, and superstitions, with the highest ranking scientific hypothesis being "the big bang" at no. 19:
the death penalty, the American dream, the holy spirit, the tooth fairy, the free market, the American system, the virgin birth, the jury system, the traditional family, the democratic process, the Easter bunny, the second amendment, the spirit world, the United Nations, the work ethic, the American people, the Bush doctrine, the Christian God, the big bang, the holy trinity, …
1NC “Ares”
“Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him:
'Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.
Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.”
- The Iliad
SAMPLE TEXT: replace “Ares” with “Liberty”
The affirmative’s appeal to Ares over Athena has repercussions- they reject limited war in favor of unrestrained, offensive war, destroying the framework of modern international law and turning case.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
The Greeks had two different gods of war — the wise and cunning goddess Athena and the bloodthirsty, unrestrained god Ares. The fact that out of 12 Olympian gods, two are devoted to armed conflict indicates the important role warfare played in the social order and the fabric of daily life. The clear distinctions between Athena’s and Ares’ methods of fighting, which correlate to their places of respect within the heavenly hierarchy, also allow some interesting reflections on the modern codification of international humanitarian law.
Although they have the same father (the almighty Zeus) and the same subject matter under their jurisdiction, Athena and Ares are very different. References to Athena note her wisdom and thoughtfulness, her capacity to wage war with strategy, discipline and tactics. She is identified as a protectress, able to engage in civilised combat using her fighting prowess for just causes, particularly in protecting her beloved Athens.[22] Her most famous weapon is her shield, not her sword, as she is seen as a warrior of defence. As well as war, Athena is the goddess of handicraft and has the power of metis, a term which relates to cunning and craftiness in terms of wisdom and strategy. She is credited with the invention of a number of essential articles, such as the bridle, which allows control of horses and thus greatly enhances both efficiency during battle and agriculture.[23] It was on Athena’s advice that Odysseus implemented the use of the Trojan Horse, and classical literature is filled with images of her purity and beauty.
The ploy of using the hollow wooden horse to gain entry into Troy is an interesting example of the connection between Athena and international humanitarian law. Modern codifications of the laws of war make a clear distinction between actions during armed conflict that are perfidious and invite confidence of the adversary to believe they are entitled to protection under international humanitarian law (such as feigning an intent to surrender under a flag of truce or a misuse of the red cross emblem) and ruses (including use of decoys, mock operations, camouflage and misinformation).[24]
Accounts of the huge horse, left by the departed Greeks, give no indication that the event involved a lure of confidence which would be illegal today under international humanitarian law. The debate between the Trojans about how to deal with this object is telling:
Thymoetes was the first to break the silence. ‘Since this is a gift to Athene,’ he said, ‘I propose that we take it into Troy and haul it up to her citadel’. ‘No, no!’ cried Capys. ‘Athene favoured the Greeks too long; we must either burn it at once or break it open to see what the belly contains.’[25]
The fateful decision to follow Thymoetes’ approach resulted in the bloody battle of Troy. However, Athena’s use of metis in this situation, and her idea of using the ruse of the wooden horse, which gave the Greeks their winning edge, is well within the current framework of international humanitarian law.
On the other hand, Ares is constructed as the ‘rush in and kill’ type. He is cruel, bloodthirsty, uncontrolled and aggressive, waging offensive wars for the sheer love of combat. His murderous and bloodstained reputation result in little respect and that given is generated from fear rather than love or admiration.[26]
Graves writes that ‘Ares loves battle for its own sake … delighting in the slaughter of men and the sacking of towns’.[27] Furthermore, unlike Athena who is usually defensive in her attacks and loyal to Greece, Ares ‘never favours one city or side more than another’ and fights as inclination prompts, not always victoriously.[28]
The preference given by most Greeks to Athena over her brutish brother is stark and stories of the two locked in battle inevitably result in victory for Athena. It appears that the Greeks valued strategy over random violence and this narrative tells much about the human desire for legitimacy and justification. Careful and strategic killing is applauded whilst uncontrolled bloodshed is shunned. There are parallels with the modern codification of international humanitarian law in its pragmatic aims to reduce (not eradicate) suffering by limiting (not banning) armed conflict. However, concepts deeply embedded into these myths which involve ‘just wars’ must be acknowledged as lacking relevance to the modern codification of international humanitarian law, an area of law which applies in all armed conflicts irrespective of the reason for the use of violence.
We must choose between Ares and Athena- choosing to invoke Ares brings mindless slaughter and ultimately the collapse of our civilization.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
Much continues to be written and reflected upon in relation to the tales of the Greek gods; understandings about power and social order found in these myths have resonance today. In the novel Cryptonomicon,[29] two characters involved in cracking codes during World War II discuss the fact that Athena with her metis is very much like modern technological cunning. They posit the proposition that all societies either worship Ares or Athena, and are either bloody and brutal, or cunning and strategically focused.[30] In their view, the battle between these two gods of war shapes whole cultures and also leads to success or downfall on the world stage. For example, they claim that the Allies were ultimately victorious in World War II due to their technological cunning and a worship of Athena. The Germans, on the other hand, are deemed to have followed Ares to their ultimate downfall.[31] As the two characters note:
‘we’ve all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behaviour that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted.’
… ‘Who is going to fight them off …?’
… ‘Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers … [but] the only way to fight [them]the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.’[32]
So what is the relationship between Athena and international humanitarian law and what use is this analysis?
At its essence, the application of international humanitarian law requires strategy, discipline and tactics in the waging of war, all attributes of Athena. The fundamental principles encoded in the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols — those of distinction, proportionality and limitation — could be linked to metis and cunning/wisdom as they all require the gathering and use of knowledge and information before the launching of lethal attacks. Like Athena, international humanitarian law allows wars to be waged but dictates how the warring should be undertaken. In doing so, the application of international humanitarian law relies on metis, knowledge and strategy rather than unconstrained violence.
For example, the principle of distinction requires the military to distinguish civilian populations and objects from combatants and military objectives, and to only direct their operations against military objectives.[33]
Hence the military must know who they are fighting, and where civilians and their objects are placed, a task that, although increasingly difficult in today’s ‘battle-space’, is nevertheless essential if the protection of civilians is to be ensured. To be faithful to the principle of proportionality, combatants must have a complex understanding of the military benefit to be gained from attack and to balance this with the ‘incidental loss of civilian life’.[34] This ‘incidental killing’ is often referred to by the sanitised term ‘collateral damage’, which does not convey the real death and destruction visited upon the area of the attack, a reality the humanitarian and human rights sector are all too familiar with. However, one suspects that the highly pragmatic Athena would have understood this balancing concept perfectly. Indeed, the complicated and layered process for the making of targeting decisions under international humanitarian law — involving the classification of an object as a ‘military objective’ under the twofold test found in art 52(2) of Additional Protocol I;[35]
the identification of lawful weapons and tactics; the undertaking of precautions to minimise civilian damage; and consideration of the principle of proportionality — require a high degree of metis to actually wage the war.
Similarly, the principle of limitation is stated succinctly: ‘In any armed conflict, the right of the Parties to the conflict to choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimited’.[36] This principle is then codified in numerous specific treaties restricting or banning certain weapons.[37] This concept of limitation requires careful analysis of the warring situation and the appropriateness of weapons and tactics to be used in the specific environment assessed.
Through the correct application of international humanitarian law, one can witness the implementation of cunning, knowledge and strategy. In doing so, the ‘mindless slaughter’ of Ares is rejected in favour of the careful planning and strategic actions of Athena. Are the triumphs of Athena over Ares in a number of battles an early version of the dissemination of international humanitarian law?[38]
The “Liberty” program solves better while avoiding the net benefit.
O’Neill 11. (Ian, astrophysicist, Space Science Producer for Discovery News, PhD in Solar Physics, author for “The Universe Today,” founder and editor of “Astroengine,” “A Rocket Called 'Liberty' Rises from Ares' Ashes” 2/8/11 ps)
It is obvious that human spaceflight is at a crossroads, particularly for US space aspirations. As we quickly approach the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, and NASA's premier plan to get the US astronauts back to the moon has been scrapped, an uneasy state of flux has befallen the US space agency.
But private enterprise is looking toward the final frontier, hoping to continue where NASA left off by launching cargo to the International Space Station and astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. And on Tuesday, two established rocket manufacturers announced their intention to construct a rocket out of the ashes of the scrapped Constellation Program, melding seasoned components from NASA and European rocket technologies.
Looking very similar to the Constellation Program's Ares I crew launch vehicle -- with a new, trendy paint-job (artist's impression top) -- the slender "Liberty" rocket will combine an Alliant Techsystems (ATK) solid rocket booster and Astrium's Ariane 5 first stage booster.
The ATK component will be pretty much unchanged from the Ares I solid booster it had under development for NASA and the Ariane 5 component has been tried and tested dozens of times in satellite launches for the European market already.
In short, by stacking the two rockets, launch costs can be lowered, tech developed for the Constellation Program needn't go to waste and the upper stage is already in operation.
Also, the ATK/Astrium partnership comes at the perfect time for President Obama's new vision for NASA spaceflight: stimulating commercial space interests. $200 million in NASA seed money (the Commercial Crew Development-2 competition) is up for grabs and there's no shortage of private firms competing for a share of the prize.
"The Liberty initiative provides tremendous value because it builds on European Ariane 5 launcher heritage, while allowing NASA to leverage the mature first stage," said Charlie Precourt, Vice President and General Manager of ATK Space Launch Systems, in Tuesday's press release. "We will provide unmatched payload performance at a fraction of the cost, and we will launch it from the Kennedy Space Center using facilities that have already been built. This approach allows NASA to utilize the investments that have already been made in our nation's ground infrastructure and propulsion systems for the Space Exploration Program."
Liberty is designed to lift 44,500 pounds (20,185 kilograms) which means it has the capability of launching any crewed vehicle that is currently in development.
"We can lift any potential crew vehicle out there, whether it's a space plane or a capsule," Kent Rominger, ATK's Vice President of Advanced Programs, told Spaceflight Now. "We can lift Orion, for that matter." (Orion is NASA's next planned crewed capsule, but since the scrapping of Constellation it is most likely to have a very limited role.)
This is certainly an exciting development for commercial spaceflight, especially as many of the Liberty components are already in use.
ATK estimates the rocket system could make its maiden flight in 2015.
notes
I think there are a couple of possibilities for this PIC.
In terms of replacements for “Ares”-
1. Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) and Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV)- this is the alternative name for the program that was used before the official title Ares. I haven’t cut ev on this yet.
2. We could actually just fund a different program that’s called “Liberty”- it’s basically the private sector continuation of Ares since Constellation was cancelled.
3. The first article I found on this actually talked about why Athena is better. I’m not sure how this would function in terms of the fact that all the government code calls it Ares and you probably can’t just start calling it “Athena” without explicitly changing the name. So that’s that.
In terms of the net benefit:
1. Obviously reasons why Ares is bad, he’s the god of mindless slaughter and stuff.
2. There’s ev that when we assign Ares to an object it makes the item more violent even if it doesn’t have a violent purpose- it seems like this could possibly have implications for the more policy-esque weaponization/militarization disad.
3. If we choose the “Liberty” route it seems like there’s actually reasons why that program is better and we could talk about coercion and stuff.
- Philippa
Myth first
Our examination of your mythological invocations is a prerequisite to effective policy.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
[This piece reflects upon the fundamental nature of international humanitarian law and explores issues surrounding the embrace of this legal regime by the humanitarian sector. By delving into images of the ancient Greek gods of war — the reasonable Athena who is linked to international humanitarian law and the bloodthirsty Ares who represents lawless war — it is argued that an in-depth understanding of the pragmatic military nature of international humanitarian law will add value to advocacy on the use of this highly specialised regime. Without acknowledging the ‘warring’ nature of international humanitarian law, as well as the contradiction of using armed force ‘for good’, implicit assumptions within the humanitarian dialogue on these topics cannot be challenged. This piece identifies the change in attitude to views on the merit of using the military for humanitarian action as well as the increasing use by many non-governmental organisations of the international humanitarian law framework, and examines the reasons why this has occurred. It then moves to an analysis of ancient Greek attitudes to different warring methods and the resonance that these myths still hold today. The piece notes the importance of maintaining the distinction between the laws which regulate the use of force (jus ad bellum) and those which regulate the conduct of hostilities (jus in bello) and concludes by urging all actors involved in international humanitarian law to continually clarify their perspective on the laws of war.]
Even if they win that international humanitarian law is flawed, the negative’s discourse change has real world implications- we must be purposeful in our invocation of Athena.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
Yet in spite of these highly positive aspects to the ‘mainstreaming’ of international humanitarian law, international political machinations are neither this simple nor unselective. As discussed above, international humanitarian law is not implemented consistently or in a neutral manner. Like all international legal systems, it is infused with global politics and inherent power dynamics. International humanitarian law is unfortunately frequently and sometimes flagrantly violated with no repercussions. The discourse change, including a favourable reception of international humanitarian law within thinking usually reserved for human rights dialogue, has a real world impact. It repositions the margins of what is acceptable and taken for granted, and what needs to be rigorously analysed. Debates on ‘humanitarian’ military interventions must come to terms with the tensions and implications of using armed force to maintain human rights, both in a philosophical and practical manner.[39] A high technical knowledge in both fields is necessary to understand the areas of compatibility and distinction within the worlds of international humanitarian law and human rights. If Athena is to be evoked by the humanitarian community to fight off evil, then there must be a clear understanding of her aims and methods. It is much better to invite Athena intentionally to the negotiating table than to accidentally find a warring god on your side.
Ext. “ares”=violent
Associating an object with Ares causes it to be perceived as more militant regardless of its actual qualities.
Hansen 4. (William F., professor of Classical Studies and Folklore as well as co-director in Mythology Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans. Oxford University Press, Inc. pgs. 114-115. ps)
The mythological tradition sometimes imputes qualities such as savagery or danger or militancy to objects and places by associating them with Ares’s name. Hippolytê, queen of the Amazons, owned the Belt of Ares as a sign of her being foremost among the Amazons (Apollodoros Library 2.5.9), a nation of warriors. The belt appears to possess no special virtue other than its name. In barbarous Colchis there is a Grove of Ares, where a dragon used to watch over the Golden Fleece (Apollodoros Library 1.9.1, 1.9.23), just as at the site of Thebes there is a Spring of Ares, which the Dragon of Ares guarded before Kadmos slew it (Library 3.4.1).
Even if not the original intention, the project name Ares invokes war and destruction.
Prange 6. (Diane Prange, author for “Strategic Name Development,” a brand naming company that focuses on the effects of product and project names. “Ares Spacecraft Has a Martial Name” 7/4/6. ps)
Naming, be it product naming, or creating a brand name, or company naming for that matter, can have unintended consequences. That appears to be the case with NASA’s spacecraft naming.
NASA insists, however, that in naming its new exploratory spacecraft the Ares I and II, it had no desire to invoke the concept of war and destruction. They found that Ares is the Greek equivalent of Roman Mars and decided it was a fitting name for spacecraft the final destination of which is the fourth planet.
Did the researchers at NASA forget, then, that Mars was the Roman god of war, and that its red color was reminiscent of blood to those who first named it? I think they may have.
Admittedly the Roman god Mars was a far more respectable deity than Greek Ares, but then again, the Romans were justly proud of their military might. They created a successful and generally well-run empire, while Greek wars tended to be internecine and leave everyone involved unequivocally worse off.
Because most of us in the modern world are introduced to Mars as the proper name of a planet before we learn any mythology, we don’t automatically associate the name with aggression. And it may be that the general public doesn’t associate much with the name Ares, except perhaps to confuse it with the astrological sign Aries.
But I think checking with a few classicists about a proposed name isn’t rocket science. I think it’s disingenuous of NASA to claim ignorance about the connotations of “Ares.”
Rockets can be and have been named after planets before (think of the Saturn series), so this isn’t like the Nyx/Nix case I recently blogged about. If they wanted a peaceful name for a Moon-Mars rocket, they could have chosen Selene, the Greek lunar deity. They didn’t.
And, I for one don't find it reassuring.
Note also that NASA is confusing matters with another pair of projects called ARES: a proposed Mars mission, dubbed Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey of Mars, and an office called Astromaterials Research & Exploration Science.
The use of the name “Ares” allows China to portray rocket programs as warlike, justifying their own actions in space- here’s evidence from “China Military Report.”
Yan 9. (Zhao, reporter for “China Military Report” online. “China-US Game of Space, "Long March" -5 Challenge Ares 1-X” 10/30/2009 Grammar and syntax errors left intact. ps)
Beijing at 23:30 on October 28, NASA "Ares 1-X" rocket at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, launch pad 39B ignition off. This is the first time the U.S. for the next generation launch vehicle flight test, the main task is to collect flight data. "Ares 1-X" is to replace the U.S. space shuttle rocket developed a new generation of manned rockets "God of War 1 (Ares1)" experimental rocket, the spacecraft will become one of the United States return to the moon.
It is learned that "God of War" series of carrier rockets bear the major thrust to send the Americans to return to the moon, and even the task of Mars voyage. The test event is also in the past 30 years, the Kennedy Space Center for the first time commitment to the latest launch vehicle testing task. Because of the weather, "God of War" rocket launch was postponed a day. In these 24 hours, more than 150 lightning hit the launch platform, the authorities have repeatedly testing various parameters to ensure the success of this launch. According to another source said the existing U.S. space shuttle will be retired by 2010, all the "Orion" and "God of War" will be held as early as 2015, a successor rocket to conduct manned space activities. But Obama administration took office, the plan to re-examine, "Orion" and "God of War" still variables in the future.
As most of today's ability to compete with the U.S. horizon, a few to a few to go is only the Chinese. The existing financial resources of Russia is concerned, there is an effort in vain, but beyond their grasp. Not to mention the European Community, there must be good projects, I am afraid that has also long been stolen by the U.S. looted as their own.
The Chinese people under the power of self-reliance, in a destitute circumstances, after nearly forty years the efforts of hard work, launch vehicle technology has made remarkable progress, "long march" series known around the world. At 12:08 on June 1, 2007, I heard a loud noise pierced the skies of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the quiet night, "long march" on the 3rd A rocket blasting out the bright orange flames, supports the weight of "SinoSat" 3 satellite pierce straight into the sky. At this point, "long march" series of carrier rockets 100 launches a complete success.
Gratifying results, "long march" series of rockets from scratch, from weak to strong, now has let the Chinese people proud of it allows Western countries daunting. However, the Chinese rocket development work started late, after all, from the progressive development of speaking, even if China is currently the best "long march" series, currently abroad, compared to the use of rockets, launch success rate still a gap. Especially in the non-toxic, non-polluting, large thrust engines still lagging behind the development position. "Long march" rocket launch preparation period is almost twice the foreign rockets; the lack of large rocket carrying capacity, the overall ability to adapt is not strong. In particular with the United States, "Hercules" relatively many gaps, though the U.S. success rate is not 100%.
However, very comfort to people is that China's space did not stop enough room for complacency, in order to catch up with the world advanced level, in order to improve the reliability of our existing rocket, developed new high-performance rocket them to struggle, the fact has proved that they are of China's pride is the pride of those laid the power status of China's efforts to pay the generations.
According to China's space sector has revealed that China's new generation of large rockets, "long march" -5 ID has entered the experimental stage, as the practice will soon launch. Sources said that in comparison with the existing rockets, a new generation of large rocket technology to improve the following main features:
Now non-toxic, non-polluting large-scale rocket launch vehicle has become the twenty-first century, the mainstream of development. Foreign early eighties in the twentieth century, has begun to develop and environmentally friendly, high-thrust liquid oxygen, kerosene or liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engine, has achieved fruitful results, and some have even been used in large-scale launch vehicle. In China, currently has a "long march" series of rockets to use more in order to unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine / nitrogen tetroxide as an intermediate thrust liquid propellant rocket engine as the main stage engine. As everyone knows, UDMH toxicity greater damage to human liver. In particular, nitrogen tetroxide / unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine combustion products of the human body more damage and seriously pollute the environment. Uses a new type of fuel rocket engine is the "long march" the most remarkable achievements, No. -5.
Key technologies, in order to further improve reliability, "long march" -5 rocket's core stage and the boosters will also be using an independent structure of the tank, instead of using a total at the end of the structure of upper stage liquid hydrogen tank used with the core the same structure as a form of liquid hydrogen tank. Boosters and the core-level binding to connect with mature statically determinate connections. In order to reduce the impact of the separation process, improve reliability, the separation of the rocket system will use a linear separation device. These new measures will significantly improve the "long march" -5 launch vehicle system reliability.
China's current mandate for the launch of a "long march" as many as 10 rockets a few models, have formed a different carrying capacity of the "long march" rocket series. However, the current foreign launch vehicle development, sought to simplify the overall structure - reducing the number of rocket and engine series, structural design and become universal, modular and serial - primarily through the use of a different upper stage, tied up a different number of solid or liquid to help Thruster and use a different fairing, to meet the different needs of the weight of the payload of the launch, an increase of selectivity and launch flexibility.
It is gratifying is that the "long march" -5 development of the rocket was also carrying out the modular idea, by 5 meters, 3.35 meters and 2.25 meters in diameter for several different combinations of thruster module can be derived to develop 14 kinds of different models of rocket family. In the foreseeable future, as China's economic, military and technological advances, the function of spacecraft and life there will be further demand. So, what will the future development of much of China's satellites or spacecraft do? In fact, this from the "long march" -5 series of rockets carrying capacity can be discerned. At present, the need for a larger carrying capacity of large spacecraft include geostationary satellite, large-scale remote-sensing satellites, deep space exploration satellites and long-term manned space station in orbit. The "long march" -5 series of rockets carrying 25 tons of low-orbit capacity calculation, we can be like "Keyhole" about 20 tons of earth resources remote sensing satellite transported to the sun-synchronous orbit, ensuring that it can always Bai Tianfei over by the target in order to facilitate its equipment photographic reconnaissance equipment, large-caliber best shooting results; weight can also be reached or nearly 20 tons of low-earth orbit space station into orbit a one-time build our own space-based, space technology in the world competition in the prison prison stand firm; they can even after several launches, build their own similar to the "International Space Station," This kind of modular large-scale manned space research center. The "long march" -5 rockets 14 tons carrying capacity of the Earth's orbit, we can launch to the moon, about 5-ton payload, sufficient to meet the coming months or even unmanned landing on the moon and so on around the lunar exploration needs.
In short, from the "long march" -5 Tai thrust carrier rockets of new, we see not only the development of space technology, decades of rich fruits can also be full of hope for its future prospects, of course, even as China's standing in the East the strong backing of one of the magic weapon for China to lay a powerful tool for world power.
AT: not our “ares”
The constellation program includes the Ares rocket, which is named after the Greek god of war.
The Ares rocket is named after the Greek god of war.
Chivers 9. (Tom, “Nasa's Ares 1-X rocket gets ready for test flight” 10/20/9 ps)
The Ares rocket, named after the Greek god of war, is part of the Constellation programme, intended to replace the three-decade-old Space Shuttle fleet. The orbital workhorses are to be retired from service next year.
Constellation will consist of Ares 1, a crew launcher, and the massive Ares 5, a heavy lifter capable of carrying large cargo needed for manned missions to the Moon and beyond.
The use of the name Ares is not neutral- Ares is the Greek god of war and even if they win their Mars argument- Mars is the Roman equivalent so our link still applies.
Potter 6. (Ned, science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Diane Sawyer,” reporter on topics including space exploration, the human genome and climate change. “Ares: Beyond the Shuttles” 7/2/6 ps)
Amid all the buildup to Discovery's flight, NASA is announcing names for the launchers that will follow it. The Crew Launch Vehicle will be called "Ares I." It's essentially a rocket adapted from the shuttle's solid-rocket boosters, carrying an Apollo-style capsule on top. A larger ship, the Cargo Launch Vehicle, will be called "Ares V." It looks, in part, like the shuttle's large external tank, with engines bolted to the base.
(Note added July 1: The Ares V engines are actually Rocketdyne RS-68s, originally designed for Boeing's Delta IV boosters. They're not SSMEs--the Space Shuttle Main Engines. Thanks to Greg for the catch.)
The name is not just some leftover god plucked from ancient mythology. Ares was the Greek god of War. Mars was the Roman god of war. Where would the Bush Administration ultimately like to send astronauts on Ares rockets? Someday, Mars.
AT: hillman turns
The aff can’t solve Hillman- their advantages prove- Hillman says you have to embrace all of war, not just mention Ares. However, we’re still going to win that their usage of the word Ares makes the impacts to their advantages inevitable.
And, the affirmative’s approach fails- Hillman conflates fascination and a deeper archetypal energy with a love of war, and Ares worship is a flawed psychological solution.
Trosclair No Date. (Gary, Jungian Analyst in private practice in Manhattan and Westchester County, New York. “War’s Attraction: Love or Fascination?” A review of “A Terrible Love of War” by James Hillman. ps)
In his latest and perhaps final book, A Terrible Love of War, James Hillman urges us to embrace war with a loving imagination in order to understand it (p. 211). If we don’t, he claims, we will never truly comprehend war, nor could we possibly speak of peace or disarmament. Such an exploration is badly needed. Unfortunately, Hillman’s imaginings are unlikely to resonate with most readers. His efforts to convince us that deep down we all really love war, narrowly defined as actual combat between nations, stretch the imagination to breaking point, for while many of us feel a fascination with war, an actual love of war is exceptional rather than universal.
Hillman overstates his case and in doing so loses the reader: War, he writes, is “the first of all norms, the standard by which all else be measured, permeating existence and therefore our existence as individuals and as societies” (p 40); “War presents the ultimate truth of the cosmos” (p. 41); War is “the father of all things” (p. 76). These statements are indicative less of an archetype than they are of a complex. Surely if a subject in an association test responded with “war” to the phrases “the father of all things,” “the first of all norms,” and “the ultimate truth of the cosmos,” the tester would conclude that the subject was under the sway of a complex. Hillman’s war complex will not resonate with many readers.
The examples Hillman chooses of men supposedly loving war are hardly representative, and sometimes misleading. He begins by quoting General George Patton as he surveys the destruction after a battle scene: “I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life.” (pg 1) Hillman quickly extracts a universal tendency from this one highly unusual individual’s experience. But for better or worse, most of us are not like Patton. Hillman goes on to quote other soldiers extensively, but his sample and his interpretation are skewed: his evidence does not support postulating the love of war itself as a universal tendency.
Hillman could have built a far more believable and effective argument if he had distinguished the love of war from a fascination with war. Love knows its object; fascination is based on a fantasy about something not truly known, and it usually seeks an archetype more basic than the object of its fascination. Love between partners can never really occur until the fascination with the archetype is replaced by love of a real flesh and blood person. Hillman interprets Aphrodite’s illicit affair with Ares as demonstrative of our love for war. But she’s not dying to get into the trenches: she wants to be penetrated by the feel of war, war once removed, someone who wars—not war itself. Once caught in flagrante, once the deception is revealed, the two are never seen together again. This was a fascinating fling, not love.
Many of us, most of us if we are honest, do have a fascination with war. War movies, war history, war novels, and now war video games, command a huge market. But this is not to say that we universally love war. This is voyeurism—a comfortable curiosity from afar. Hillman, surprisingly, asks why men willingly go to war but need coercion to remain there. Once they are exposed to the reality, the fantasies about underlying archetypes are dispelled and another motivation is needed to keep them on the front. He fails to contend with the enormous discrepancy between what we imagine about war and its reality.
Hillman argues that one reason we love war is because it is sublime—it holds a terrifying form of beauty. This confuses the side effects of war with war itself. War may “reveal the sublime,” as Hillman puts it, but this is through contrast and bold relief rather than an aesthetic appreciation for war itself. He writes about a German soldier decorating his trench with trees and flowers, as if that indicated that the soldier felt that war is beautiful (p. 117). It is more likely that it is the pure ugliness of war and absence of beauty that compel men to seek out the sublime in the midst of battle.
In fact, it is probably more accurate to say that we become numb to war itself and focus on other things to buoy us in such situations. Hillman quotes journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote that during the 1940 bombing of London he felt “a terrible joy and exaltation at the sight and sound and taste and smell of all this destruction.” (pg 116) While it’s possible to have more than one feeling at a time, this sort of aesthetic enthrallment requires oblivion to the utter horror that people and their homes and culture are being decimated. In reality, rather than achieving a heightened aesthetic sense, most soldiers survive by numbing themselves, as did a soldier at the end of the German film Stalingrad.. Stumbling through snow-covered Russia with little hope of survival he says, “The good thing about the cold is that you don’t feel anything.”
Hillman also argues that war is inhuman, an autonomous force, a God to be respected. It is true that an inhuman rage or ferocious passion may take over during battle (p. 80) and it may well be understood as an autonomous force. But this force also takes over in other circumstances and is not specific to war in the sense that Hillman uses the term. People can be possessed by intense fury in individual situations (which Hillman excludes from his definition of war), and they can be possessed by it in the fight for many other causes. Warlike behavior is evidence of archetypal energy manifest in just one particular way. The energy is far more deep, pliable and profound than Hillman’s war. Just as the intensity of the coniunctio (the sacred marriage) can find expression in alchemy, passionate sex, and the analytic process, the archetypes that find expression in combat are also found in a host of other situations. Hillman’s description of the ancient god of war—(p. 82) wild, untamable, overpowering, excessive, insane, bloody, assured, wanton--could just as well be applied to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, abstract expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, or boxer Mike Tyson. This God does not need combat to show his face.
Yet how are we to understand the experience of those soldiers whose experience did yield meaning, who experienced courage, altruism, or a mystical connection with something greater than themselves, and whose fascination seems to linger even after they’ve been through the real thing? Hillman quotes one soldier who wrote, “You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt alive before or since” (p. 11). Here as elsewhere, Hillman confuses a love of war and a reaction to it. The compassion that soldiers develop for their comrades is more likely born of their mutual hatred of war as the enemy rather than their love for it. This sense of being more alive has less to do with a love of war and more to do with a forced appreciation of life.
For some, war seems to engender an intensity which makes peace seem painfully mundane. Veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges explores this phenomenon in his powerful book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, reaching far different conclusions than Hillman. Hedges argues that what appears as a love of war is actually an addiction to a substitute for true meaning in life. This sort of addictive intensity is not limited exclusively to battle combat. Greg Henderson, a physician caught in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and trying to administer medicine under horrific conditions wrote, “This is an edifying experience. One is rapidly focused away from the transient and material to the bare necessities of life.” Further examples could be drawn from firefighters, cancer survivors, and political campaigners, among others. All of these gripping experiences say less about war, fire, cancer, and politics, specifically, and more about what happens when the veils of the trivial are removed.
Jung expressed the same idea in 1939 when he spoke of the neurosis of a banal and meaningless life. “They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war: They say, ‘Thank heaven, now something is going to happen—something bigger than ourselves.’” v. 18 par 627
For a small number, war may serve as the occasion for meaning, as an alchemical vas or vessel, an opportunity for transformative experiences of more fundamental archetypes, many of them described in alchemy: calcinatio, burning away the impurities of banal and materialist life; solutio, dissolving old rigid ways of being; mortificatio, dying away of the old ruling attitudes; coincidentia oppositorum, the conflict of opposites which potentially leads to a new beginning. Add to these the confusing possibility of concretizing the hero’s journey, and it is no wonder that war is not only fascinating but also transformative for some. But again, one should not confound the vessel with the gold.
Hillman’s vision of Ares changes dramatically in the last 17 pages (pg 200). After 200 pages as the beserk, furious and insane god, Ares suddenly becomes a god of restraint and the protector of civilization. Hillman suggests a homeopathic cure: worshipping Ares and asking him for the courage to restrain from impulsive war. While this shift is quite welcome and redeems Hillman from some of his earlier excesses, these final pages also harbor a psychological approach questionable to many Jungians. Hillman recommends that we “leash” the energies of war, and in so doing he advocates sublimation, failing to differentiate it from the alchemical process known as the sublimatio. Sublimation is a Freudian concept, a higher level defense mechanism: channeling unacceptable id energies into socially acceptable behavior. Sublimatio, on the other hand, traces the energy back to the prima materia and raises it to its own highest level, rather than allowing the energy to flow into less constructive uses. Leashing war is sublimation, not an alchemical sublimatio. The energies that serve as fuel in war’s hijackings have the natural and inherent capacity to serve greater ends.
**Aff
2AC
The thesis of their PIC is wrong- Ares is another name for Mars, in reference to the planet- we don’t invoke the god of war.
NASA 6 (“Ares: NASA's New Rockets Get Names.” 6/30/06 ps)
NASA announced on Friday the names of the next generation of launch vehicles that will return humans to the moon and later take them to Mars and other destinations. The crew launch vehicle will be called Ares I, and the cargo launch vehicle will be known as Ares V.
"It's appropriate that we named these vehicles Ares, which is a pseudonym for Mars," said Scott Horowitz, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Washington. "We honor the past with the number designations and salute the future with a name that resonates with NASA's exploration mission."
The "I and V" designations pay homage to the Apollo program's Saturn I and Saturn V rockets, the first large U.S. space vehicles conceived and developed specifically for human spaceflight.
The crew exploration vehicle, which will succeed the space shuttle as NASA's spacecraft for human space exploration, will be named later. This vehicle will be carried into space by Ares I, which uses a single five-segment solid rocket booster, a derivative of the space shuttle's solid rocket booster, for the first stage. A liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen J-2X engine derived from the J-2 engine used on Apollo's second stage will power the crew exploration vehicle's second stage. The Ares I can lift more than 55,000 pounds to low Earth orbit.
Ares V, a heavy lift launch vehicle, will use five RS-68 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engines mounted below a larger version of the space shuttle's external tank, and two five-segment solid propellant rocket boosters for the first stage. The upper stage will use the same J-2X engine as the Ares I. The Ares V can lift more than 286,000 pounds to low Earth orbit and stands approximately 360 feet tall. This versatile system will be used to carry cargo and the components into orbit needed to go to the moon and later to Mars.
Project Ares is not based on the god Ares at all, but rather on the Roman’s name for the planet Mars.
Collect Space 6. (“NASA's history, future inspire rocket name.” 6/30/6. ps)
June 30, 2006 — After months of unofficial, internal use, NASA formally announced names for its next generation of launch vehicles intended to take humans to the Moon, on to Mars and beyond.
Project Ares (pronounced air-eez or ah-rays) includes the agency's crew launch vehicle, now referred to as Ares I, and the cargo launch vehicle, which will be called Ares V.
According to Scott Horowitz, associate administrator for Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, the name Ares was borrowed from the Romans' title for the planet Mars and not the constellation or Greek deity.
"We named the vehicle for the Roman use of the word, which is for Mars," Horowitz told reporters at Kennedy Space Center. "We didn't name it after a god of war, that is not our intent."
The CP can’t solve- Ares is how the lit describes the program- government code should dictate the plan’s language even if they win the name is bad.
Changing from Ares delays CP solvency- legal procedures complicate the process and it doesn’t matter- astronauts rename it anyway.
Collect Space 6. (“NASA's history, future inspire rocket name.” 6/30/6. ps)
"There were hundreds of names [rejected], so I couldn't even possibly go through all the names. You know, all the constellations in the sky, all the Greek and Roman gods, all their children, the cousins, it went on and on and on," joked Horowitz.
"I just asked Jeff Hanley and [Exploration Launch Office manager] Steve Cook and all the people working on the program to look at a list of all these names and suggest a name to me that they would like to have represent their program and project. So they came to me with the name Ares and I approved it."
"We [then had] a legal process we [had] to go through," described Horowitz. "We have to make sure we aren't infringing on any copyrights or anything. In fact, we've already filed a federal intent to use trademark on the Ares name for this rocket. So you have to go through that whole process and that just takes time."
That same process held up naming the crew exploration vehicle. According to Hanley, that title would be released soon.
"We are trading three or four names at this point. There is a running, leading candidate that of course, I can't talk about yet because we have to go through a process to have it vetted and approved. Hopefully, I'd like to think that in a month we'd be able to role that out," said Hanley.
If the same NASA documents that mentioned Ares months ago can offer any hint, then the CEV may soon be known as Antares.
Even if true however, the astronauts who fly atop Ares in Antares may assign names of their own, as had been the practice during Apollo (e.g. Apollo 11's Command Module Columbia).
Shared Horowitz, "If the crews decide they would like to name their capsules, I have no objection to them doing that. That's fine if they want to personalize their mission on their vehicle."
The name Ares is inevitable- entrenched in the lit and simplicity determined it.
Collect Space 6. (“NASA's history, future inspire rocket name.” 6/30/6. ps)
"I had seen [the name Ares used] in a lot of contexts over the years," said Horowitz. "If you go back and read the original book The Case for Mars, the shuttle derived launch vehicle in that book used Ares because it meant Mars."
"In fact, it's used as an acronym for a winged vehicle that Langley designed to be a Mars glider, so Ares gets used a lot when people are talking about Mars-type missions. I have seen it a lot over the years."
"So when I saw it, it seemed like an obvious choice to me. Its [sic] simple, its easy to pronounce, its easy to spell. I like simple," concluded Horowitz.
hillman turns
Turn: The affirmative’s naming allows a cultural confrontation and examination of humanity’s deep ties to war.
Heinegg 4. (Peter, teaches in the department of humanities at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. “The Cult of Ares” 11/1/4. ps)
He begins by reminding us that war is a perennial, not an accidental, feature of human life. But how could this be, if fighters did not experience, at least on occasion, what Yeats called “a terrible beauty”? Hillman summons up a dazzling cloud of witnesses, literary and otherwise, to the “erotics” of war, from Homer to Philip Roth, from Troy to the Milvian Bridge to Antietam to Iwo Jima to Vietnam, with excerpts from letters and journals by generations of soldiers on every kind of battleground. “Now the fight was at its wildest,” writes a U.S. lieutenant from Germany in World War II. “We dashed from one building to another, shooting, bayoneting, clubbing.” The wounded and the dead “lay in grotesque positions at every turn.” “Never in my wildest imagination had I conceived that battle could be so incredibly impressive—awful, horrible, deadly yet somehow thrilling, exhilarating.” And such ecstasy cannot be dismissed as rare sadistic perversity. Not for nothing have the poets made Mars and Venus lovers.
Hillman calls this the religion of war, and it certainly has its own powerful creed, code and cult. Nor, however much of a pacifist Jesus may have been, has Christianity managed to avoid centuries of cross-fertilization (or cross-contamination) from this horrific brand of piety. Just look at some of the more bloodthirsty scenes in the Book of Revelation or “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic” or current talk about the “crusade in Iraq” by Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin and others. (Ignatian spirituality, readers of America presumably know, is profoundly shaped by military metaphors.) In any event, Hillman makes a crucial point in arguing that it does no good to pretend that the instincts of war aren’t thickly rooted in the depths of our subconsciousness, or that the nightmares of war are never interrupted by transcendent, even blissful, flashes of generosity, brotherhood, selfless love and, yes, beauty (think of “Saving Private Ryan”). Is it just a coincidence that the most popular politician in America right now is the war hero Senator John McCain?
Hillman presses his case for the presence of Ares in our DNA with marvelous eloquence and zest. “Wars could not happen unless there were those willing to let them happen. Conscripts, slaves, indentured soldiers, unwilling draftees to the contrary, there are always masses ready to answer the call to arms, to join up, get in the fight. There are always leaders rushing to take the plunge. Every nation has its hawks. Moreover, resisters, dissenters, pacifists, objectors, and deserters rarely are able to bring war to a halt. The saying, ‘Someday they’ll give a war and no one will come’ [sic] remains a fond wish. War drives everything else off the front page.”
Perhaps the only serious flaw in Hillman’s case is the abrupt way he discounts the “testosterone hypothesis,” war as a more or less exclusively guy-thing. He mentions the legendary Amazons and alludes to, without naming, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and female suicide-bombers in Chechnya. “Patriarchy,” he somewhat dubiously claims, “does not originate war but serves war to give it form and bring it to order by means of hierarchical control, ritual ceremony, art, and law.” Perhaps the validity of such sky-writing generalizations cannot be fully tested until the distant day when women win full equality.
At any rate, the inevitable question remains: having traced war into the very structures of humanness, what in heaven’s name are we to do about it? Of course, if 10,000 years of civilization have failed to come up with a satisfactory answer, we can hardly fault Hillman’s for sounding lame: he calls for “aesthetic intensity.” Noting the relentless Philistinism of warlike nations, including the United States, he bids us imagine the creation of beauty transforming “civilization’s wasteful ‘stress.’” War might lose some of its sublime magic if “all [its] diabolic inventiveness, intolerant obsession and drive to conquer” were “compelled toward culture.” Needless to say, Hillman cannot tell us just how that might be done.
But then again, concrete fixes are not what grand visionaries like Hillman are all about. In this warmhearted, learned, intensely personal yet densely theoretical Last Hurrah, he bids us look past the clichés of conservative patriotism and liberal meliorism into the scary abysses of our Martian selves. Given the hideous stories on the nightly news these days, it’s an invitation that is hard to resist.
AT: durham impact
Turn: viewing war through the lens of a “just” and “humanitarian” Athena allows atrocities to be justified in the name of peace.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
There is no doubt that civil society’s view of the merit of military action as a method of humanitarian assistance has dramatically shifted in the last decade. In his book, The Dark Sides of Virtue, David Kennedy writes about the rapid shift from the Vietnam era of viewing the military as the ‘baddies’ — ‘peace and protest still hung in the air … [t]he military seemed all that international law was not, violence and aggression to our reason and restraint’[9] — to the situation where the military were seen to implement ‘good stuff’ — ‘[b]y the early 1990s, the most liberal of my students embraced each new American military deployment with enthusiasm … the military seemed newly capable of saving failed states and mending broken societies abroad’.[10]
Indeed, in my memory, it seemed only a short time between attending protests in the city square about the Australian Defence Force (‘ADF’) getting ‘out’ of Iraq in the early 1990s to attending protests in the city square about the ADF getting ‘into’ East Timor. Yet what are the implications of perceiving military action as an instrument of humanitarian action rather than violent interference for the population it seeks to assist? For some commentators, moving toward the acceptance of such a role of armed forces is extremely dangerous. As David Chandler writes: ‘Over the last decade, the universal humanist core of humanitarian action has been undermined and humanitarianism has become an ambiguous concept capable of justifying the most barbaric of military actions’.[11] Within this context, it is also important to acknowledge that the shift in perception of the military by the humanitarian sector could also be seen to have contributed to an overly optimistic sense of the value and capacity of international humanitarian law. Can military actions in the humanitarian sphere be seen as a ‘mission creep’ and, if so, has it obscured where international humanitarian law comes from, and what is at its philosophical core? Curiously, whilst the debate rages on about the legitimacy of military interventions, particularly those without a clear mandate from the UN Security Council, international humanitarian law has never been so popular.
In the last decade, non-state actors, in particular non-governmental organisations, have increased their use of international humanitarian law as a tool for dialogue with governments, militaries and even the general public. Since the 1990s, groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam have started using the international humanitarian law framework in their activities, be it in critiquing military actions or in policy papers dealing with humanitarian crises.[12] The statement by the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, that there are ‘no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems’,[13] is being demonstrated in the changing methods used by many NGOs today which move beyond the traditional human rights and development approach to encompass political dialogue on international humanitarian law issues. The reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accusing NATO forces of violating the rules of distinction and proportionality in Serbia in the late 1990s are clear examples of humanitarian organisations engaging in detailed analysis of international humanitarian law principles.[14]
Of course, one humanitarian movement has had a particularly strong relationship with international humanitarian law spanning over a century. The tight nexus forged between the Red Cross/Crescent Movement (in particular the ICRC) and international humanitarian law is a given, and need not be reflected upon in this piece.[15] The pragmatic working methods used by the ICRC, its international legal personality, and its ‘cloak’ of neutrality and confidentiality, have always set it apart from the rest of civil society and allows its relationship with international humanitarian law to be one of great ease.[16] After World War II, during the attempts at the highest political level to prohibit the resort to force under international law, Kennedy writes: ‘The professionals at the Red Cross were … standoffish. In their tradition, it was more realistic simply to accept that war would occur, and work to blunt its impact through rules painstakingly wrung from the military itself’.[17]
Pragmatic, conservative and focused to the core, the important role the ICRC plays in advocating adherence to international humanitarian law is neither new nor puzzling. What is new is the warm embrace being given by the broader humanitarian and human rights sector to an area of law which, although containing some provisions of a very similar nature to fundamental human rights, nevertheless allows killing with impunity (combatant to combatant) and the indefinite detention of individuals for the commission of no crime (prisoners of war and other detainees).
An examination of this recent rush to embrace the legal normative framework of international humanitarian law needs to take into account a number of factors. The first is the ‘seduction’ of international humanitarian law as an area of international law which is enforceable and results in ‘baddies’ being put behind bars or even executed. The spectacular rise in the number of international enforcement mechanisms dealing generally with international criminal law, and more specifically with international humanitarian law, has had the effect of bringing the public’s attention to the capacity to prosecute those accused of war crimes. There is a general understanding, not limited to the echelons of the elite, that those accused of atrocities should be held responsible and, in selected cases, there is now the infrastructure for this to occur. With the establishment by the Security Council of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (‘ICTY’) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (‘ICTR’), the entry into force of the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) and the development of ‘hybrid’ tribunals, such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, international humanitarian law prosecutions are now part of the international legal landscape.
As well as the recognition of the ‘teeth’ of international humanitarian law, which can bite those who disobey it, international humanitarian law can also be perceived as having a greater chance of influencing those in positions of authority. The lack of capacity to suspend international humanitarian law — unlike certain elements of human rights law — makes it an attractive and, at times, more certain legal framework. Furthermore, international humanitarian law has not been subjected to the same degree of cultural challenges that have beset human rights norms. As René Provost writes:
The multiplicity of conventional regimes in human rights is one factor which has been said to have contributed to the fragmentation of this field of international law. This is compounded by a number of institutions attached to these distinct regimes. International humanitarian law, on the contrary, encompasses fewer regimes less likely to foster distinctive approaches to the protection of war victims …[18]
There are many areas where international humanitarian law and human rights law overlap: both ‘aim to protect human life, prohibit torture or cruel treatment’, prescribe basic judicial guarantees, ‘prohibit discrimination’ and ‘regulate aspects of the right to food and health’.[19] However, international humanitarian law contains rules dealing with issues not found in human rights law, including:
the conduct of hostilities, combatant and prisoner of war status and the protection of the red cross and red crescent emblems. Similarly, [international human rights law] deals with aspects of life in peacetime that are not regulated by [international humanitarian law], such as freedom of the press, the right to assembly, to vote and to strike.[20]
Written by the military, for the military, about the military, international humanitarian law treaties, particularly the universally ratified Geneva Conventions, are pragmatic documents which relate to bare survival during the most horrific condition humans can manufacture — armed conflict. They are not like human rights laws which provide a raft of rights for individuals to ‘be the best they can be’ in broader social, economic and cultural ways. Rather, international humanitarian law is both a permissive and restrictive regime for the military and other authorities during war, setting out protections and determining when such protections can be taken away. Indeed, one of the fundamental human rights — ‘the right to life’ — is explicitly taken away in certain circumstances, with international humanitarian law allowing combatants to kill combatants with impunity.[21]
Given that international humanitarian law is at odds with human rights law in some fundamental respects — and is certainly more practical, even cold, in the face of the realities of armed conflict — has the humanitarian sector got it wrong in using international humanitarian law as a framework and tool to critique perceived inhumane actions of a state? Is international humanitarian law rather a way for the military to effectively wage war? Is the philosophical basis of international humanitarian law related to military strategy rather than aiming for the protection of civilians? Is the humanitarian sector expecting too much from international humanitarian law?
Perhaps some of the answers to these questions can be found in the writings and myths of the ancient Greeks. Between 800 BCE and 500 CE, Greek civilisation developed a body of philosophical concepts and political ideas which have had a profound influence on political leaders throughout history. Much current philosophy and theories of modern science owe their foundations to Greek thought, especially in the Western world. So what did Greek writing have to say on limitations in war?
Turn: using Athena to understand international law creates a dangerous precedent of just war and weakens the legal regime.
Durham 7. (Helen, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria; Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; Program Director for Research and Development, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law. "International Humanitarian Law and the Gods of War: The Story of Athena versus Ares,” 2007 Melbourne Journal of International Law ps)
It is noteworthy that the ancient Greeks, unlike the Romans, had no one particular god dedicated to ‘peace’. There was an acceptance that ‘[c]onflict was part of the human world as run by gods’.[40] The parallel between international humanitarian law and Athena is useful for reflection but obviously has strong limitations. The clear separation between the laws governing the legality of war and the laws governing conduct during hostilities (the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello) does not exist in ancient Greek myths and Athena is often applauded and admired for her decisions to engage in ‘just’ wars. This is not compatible with the modern codification of international humanitarian law and there are significant dangers in advancing the concept that ‘legitimate’ and ‘just’ conflicts (highly subjective notions in themselves) are privileged to a less restrictive legal regime. Whilst Athena fought ‘just’ wars in a ‘just’ manner, there are great dangers in linking the two concepts together. Irrespective of the political aims of any military intervention, the consistent application of international humanitarian law in times of armed conflict is one of its strongest ‘humanising’ factors. To allow the use of force for ‘good’ to ignore the fundamental tenets of distinction, proportionality and limitation is to greatly weaken a legal regime based on the concept of neutrality of purpose.
“ares” not equal war-loving
The aff doesn’t trigger a want for war- reference to Ares implies its distastefulness- Athena represents the splendor of battle, making it more desirable.
Hansen 4. (William F., professor of Classical Studies and Folklore as well as co-director in Mythology Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans. Oxford University Press, Inc. pg 113 ps)
Ares (Roman Mars)
God of war.
Ares is a war diety with an insatiable taste for violence and slaughter. Accordingly, he is not an attractive deity to either mortals or immortals. Doubtless Zeus spoke for many when he told him (Homer Iliad 5.890-891):
You are the most hateful to me of the gods who dwell on Olympos,
For strife is always dear to you, and wars and battles.
Although Ares and Athena are both war deities, they reflect different aspects of the phenomenon, Ares embodying that which is distasteful in battle and Athena representing its splendor and nobility.
1NC “Deploy”
SAMPLE TEXT: The USFG should employ X weapon system…
The term “deployment” has no stable definition in international law- creates potential for international misunderstanding.
Bourbonnière and Lee 8. (Michel Bourbonnière: Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, Canada, Canadian Space Agency (CSA); Professor of Law, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario; Professor, International Institute of Humanitarian Law, San Remo, Italy; Fellow of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS), National Defense University, Washington. Ricky J. Lee: Principal, Ricky Lee & Associates; Lecturer, School of Law, Flinders University of South Australia; and Managing Director, Activer Consulting Pty. Ltd., Australia. Member of the International Institute of Space Law and the space law committees of the International Bar Association and the International Law Association. “Legality of the Deployment of Conventional Weapons in Earth Orbit: Balancing Space Law and the Law of Armed Conflict,” The European Journal of International Law Vol. 18 no. 5, 2008. ps)
It is noteworthy that there is no definition of the concept of ‘ deployment ’ in international law and, specifically, the Treaty Between the USA and the USSR on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, 2 Oct. 1972, 944 UNTS 13, which entered into force on 3 Oct. 1972, does not have a definition of the term ‘ space based ’ , and state practice on this issue is not discernable: see, e.g., Smith, ‘ Legal Implications of a Space-Based Ballistic Missile Defense ’ , (1985) 52 California Western Int’l LJ (1985) 64. It is also not defined in space law: see Vlasic, ‘ The Legal Aspects of Peaceful and Non-peaceful Uses of Outer Space ’ , in B. Jasani (ed.), Peaceful and Non-Peaceful Uses of Space: Problems of Definition for the Prevention of an Arms Race (1991), at 45. The concept of ‘ space ’ or, specifically, the delimitation between airspace and outer space, is also not defined in space law: see Kopal, ‘ The Question of Defining Outer Space ’ 8 J Space. L (1980) 134; and Cheng, ‘ The Legal Regime of Airspace and Outer Space: The Boundary Problem – Functioning versus Spatialism ’ 7 Annual of Air & Space L (1982) 339. However, it is commonly accepted that, if an object completes a full orbit around the Earth without the addition of energy then it is considered to be in outer space: see, e.g., A.F. Inglis and A. Luther, Satellite Technology: An Introduction (2nd edn., 1997). The word ‘ deployment ’ also has a slightly different temporal connotation from ‘ space based ’ that implies a degree of some sort of permanence. The word ‘ deploy ’ in its ordinary meaning simply implies to bring into position for military action. Consequently, if broadly interpreted the deployment of a weapon does not necessarily imply a complete orbit or a concept of permanence that is presupposed with the term ‘ space based ’ and includes a weapon travelling through outer space without completing an orbit around the Earth. Broadly interpreted the word ‘ deployment ’ may also include the act of deploying.
AND the use of the word “deploy” acts as an emotional trigger for members of the debate community who have friends or relatives serving in the military overseas – builds anxiety and fear
Blow 10. (Kimchi, military wife, Bible teacher, freelance writer, speaker at several organizations including PWOC International and AGLOW International, contributing author to Life Savors for Women, author of monthly devotions for the PWOC International website. She says that her drive for encouraging others comes from her own personal testimony of being orphaned in the streets of Vietnam as a young child and experiencing domestic abuse, divorce, widowhood and the aftermath of abortion. “Deployed, A Spiritual Position!” Devotions, Oct 4, 2010. PWOC International, ps)
When most military wives hear the word “deploy,” it sends us on an emotional roller coaster ride. We’re tempted to take our spouses and families, pack up and go AWOL! Some of the thoughts and feelings we experience might be fear, anxiety, loneliness, depression, or even death. Why does this word “deploy” make us feel so vulnerable? As military wives we must learn to accept this word on more positive terms. Yes, it is our duty! “Why?” you might ask, or some might say, “ I didn’t sign up for this!” Well, in fact you did when you married your military spouse. News flash, “You are now a deployed soldier too!” You are the soldier who stays in the rear and keeps the mission going at home. Just like your soldier, your orders are now set, you have a specific mission and self-sacrifice and bravery are needed! Your spouse’s job entails defending a nation at all costs. Yikes!! Maybe some of you didn’t think about it before you jumped in and said, “YES!” Then again, some of you did. Either way, deployments are not an easy thing to accept, never mind to endure. It takes courage and more than that it takes faith.
The word “deploy” in Webster’s is defined as such: “apart, to spread out, position according to plan, to be deployed.” As spouses, we only hear the word “apart” and a year of taking on a lot of extra responsibility! Let’s look at what the Greek translation says about the word “deployed” from scripture. Now there’s a concept, looking at what God says about it and not how we “feel” about it. The word “deployed,“ from the Greek word arak, means to “arrange in rows, put in order, take up position and to set a value.” Wow, I like the last one, “to set a value!” Notice there were no negative words, such as fear, loneliness, anxiety, or even death. However, I know that our emotions tend to rule our thoughts and words, but as Christian soldiers deployed in God’s Army, we must look past our thoughts and let truth rule! After all, God tells us in His Word to hold all our thoughts captive (2 Corinthians 10:5).
2nc overview
Deploy can mean to position or to use- means that other countries could misunderstand the aff’s policy as an intent to attack.
American Heritage Dictionary 9. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; updated in 2009. ps)
de·ploy (d-ploi)
v. de·ployed, de·ploy·ing, de·ploys
v.tr.
1.
a. To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line.
b. To bring (forces or material) into action.
c. To base (a weapons system) in the field.
2. To distribute (persons or forces) systematically or strategically.
3. To put into use or action: "Samuel Beckett's friends suspected that he was a genius, yet no one knew . . . how his abilities would be deployed" (Richard Ellmann).
The word “deploy” means different things to different groups, creating a dangerous potential for misunderstanding.
Stanley 8 (Sgt. John J., M.A., twenty-one year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department; worked a variety of assignments including, custody, patrol, training and administrative support; also a published historian and has written extensively on the history of law enforcement and corrections. “The use of less lethal weapons in corrections – Concepts & terms.” January 8, 2008. ps)
What do we mean when we say less-lethal weapons were deployed?
If you use the word deploy whenever you fire a less-lethal weapon, you are using the word incorrectly.
defines deploy as, "to come into a position ready for use." One of the definitions in Webster’s Dictionary says deploy means, "to station, or place, in accordance with a plan."
There is no soldier or Marine who would ever confuse the word deployment with employment or use. Unfortunately, this is often the case in law enforcement and is codified in certain less-lethal weapons manufacturer’s lesson plans. No one would ever say that they deployed bullets from their gun. Why then do we say that we deployed OC or a TASER on an inmate?
It is necessary to create a distinction between the word “deploy” and the word “employ”; doing otherwise empirically risks misunderstandings and accidental use of weapons.
Stanley 8 (Sgt. John J., M.A., twenty-one year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department; worked a variety of assignments including, custody, patrol, training and administrative support; also a published historian and has written extensively on the history of law enforcement and corrections. “The use of less lethal weapons in corrections – Concepts & terms.” January 8, 2008. ps)
What word should you use then?
Commander Sid Heal, of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, says, "Use the word 'employ' when describing something being put into service and ‘deploy’ when something is placed into a position so that it can be used. You can deploy a TASER [or any other less lethal] without using it. You can also deploy a TASER without employing it, and vice versa."
Deploying a less-lethal weapon means that you are routinely carrying it or are moving it from an armory into your jail or prison. When you actually use it on an inmate or inmates you are employing it. If this word doesn't work for you try firing, activating, or any other term that is synonymous with use. According to Cmd. Heal, "Clarity is essential for understanding. When you are talking to a lay jury, you are in fact teaching them. Hence, common terminology and clarity become critical factors."
Why is the use of proper terminology important?
During the Los Angeles Riots in 1992 National Guard troops and Marines were routinely deployed with local law enforcement. Marines were assigned to work with deputy sheriffs and police officers in south Los Angeles County. There is one story that involved two Compton Police Officers and their Marine backup that has become a legend.
The two officers responded to a domestic violence call with the Marines in support. As the story goes, the officers asked the Marines to cover them before they approached the house. The officers then stepped out and approached the dwelling.
As soon as they did the Marines began riddling the house with their M16s. The facts of this encounter are slightly different: One of the officers in fact took shotgun pellets to the leg before the Marines opened up, but, they did open up. And the house was peppered with rounds to an extent well beyond the wildest dreams of any cop who has ever asked to be "covered" by a partner.
"Cover me" means something very different to soldiers and Marines than it does to cops. Fortunately, no one inside the house was injured, but it shows the importance of knowing the right terminology and using it properly. A misunderstanding and improper use of common terminology can not only lead to confusion, it can lead to tragedy.
A2: Vagueness
Definitions in the affirmative’s legislation solve: we’ll defend that deploy in the context of the affirmative means to base a weapons system in the field.
American Heritage Dictionary 9. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; updated in 2009. ps)
de·ploy (d-ploi)
v. de·ployed, de·ploy·ing, de·ploys
v.tr.
1.
a. To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line.
b. To bring (forces or material) into action.
c. To base (a weapons system) in the field.
2. To distribute (persons or forces) systematically or strategically.
3. To put into use or action: "Samuel Beckett's friends suspected that he was a genius, yet no one knew . . . how his abilities would be deployed" (Richard Ellmann).
The affirmative doesn’t misuse the word deploy- it means to arrange in a position of readiness
11. ( Unabridged, Based on the Random House Dictionary, 2011. ps)
de·ploy
[dih-ploi] Show IPA
–verb (used with object)
1. Military . to spread out (troops) so as to form an extended front or line.
2. to arrange in a position of readiness, or to move strategically or appropriately: to deploy a battery of new missiles.
The word “deploy” has allowed the weapons of war to enter language.
Cloud 10. (Darrah, a playwright and screenwriter who has just completed her first novel and has a degree in poetry from the Iowa Writer's Worksop. “On the word, ‘deploy’.” August 13, 2010. ps)
Last Sunday I read a recipe in the New York Times for General Tso's Scallops in which the editor used the word "deploy." "The chef deployed his skillet..." Yesterday, I heard the word "deploy" used on NPR to discuss someone's personal journey towards enlightenment: "I deployed my empathy..." War has penetrated our language like an eerie snakey smoke, making us feel creative for using one of its weapons, its words.
A2: Military Families
“Deploy” can be an inspirational word for military families, allowing them to create meaning in knowing that their life is serving others.
Blow 10. (Kimchi, military wife, Bible teacher, freelance writer, speaker at several organizations including PWOC International and AGLOW International, contributing author to Life Savors for Women, author of monthly devotions for the PWOC International website. She says that her drive for encouraging others comes from her own personal testimony of being orphaned in the streets of Vietnam as a young child and experiencing domestic abuse, divorce, widowhood and the aftermath of abortion. “Deployed, A Spiritual Position!” Devotions, Oct 4, 2010. PWOC International, ps)
In the end, deployments are never easy. But through them, we have the opportunity to place that stigma aside and make it the best year. With every great sacrifice comes even greater change. God requires us to not only love Him but also to honor Him in all we do. Deployments are part of our worship to Him, a sacrifice of the heart and an endless message that we are not only in this for us, but more so, for Him. So, the next time you hear the word “deployed,“ think of it along these terms: God is giving you an opportunity to be deployed into a position of order and make a valuable impact for others. After all, our life is not our own, but rather, it is the Lord’s to deploy.
1NC “Development”
SAMPLE TEXT : The USFG should substantially increase cultivation of lunar resources through lunar mining.
No matter the context, the word development evokes the memory of what those lower in society are not, killing value to life- The affirmative can’t separate themselves from the word’s connotations
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 10-11)
Throughout the century, the meanings associated with urban development and colonial development concurred with many others to transform the word 'development', step by step, into one with contours that are about as precise as those of an amoeba. It is now a mere algorithm whose significance depends on the context in which it is employed. It may allude to a housing project, to the logical sequence of a thought, to the awakening of a child's mind, to a chess game or to the budding of a teenager's breasts. But even though it lacks, on its own, any precise denotation, it is firmly seated in popular and intellectual perception. And it always appears as an evocation of a net of significances in which the person who uses it is irremediably trapped.
Development cannot delink itself from the words with which it was formed - growth, evolution, maturation. Just the same, those who now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of meanings that impart a specific blindness to their language, thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used. or the precise connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the expression becomes qualified and coloured by meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel: 'Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries that surround us or. at least. that which will guide us toward their solution.' But for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word 'development' - profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction -is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.
Development creates the poor as a homogenous entity that can only be compared to the rich
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 7)
Underdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others' reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue, a mirror that defines their identity, which is really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority.
Truman was not the first to use the word. Wilfred Benson. a former member of the Secretariat of the International Labour Organization, was probably the person who invented it when he referred to the 'underdeveloped areas' while writing on the economic basis for peace in 1942.' But the expression found no further echo, neither with the public nor with the experts. Two years later, Rosenstein-Rodan continued to speak of 'economically backward areas'. Arthur Lewis, also in 1944, referred to the gap between the rich and the poor nations. Throughout the decade, the expression appeared occasionally in technical books or United Nations documents. But it only acquired relevance when Truman presented it as the emblem of his own policy. In this context, it took on an unsuspected colonizing virulence. Since then, development has connoted at least one thing: to escape from the undignified condition called underdevelopment. When Nyerere proposed that development be the political mobilization of a people for attaining their own objectives, conscious as he was that it was madness to pursue the goals that others had set; when Rodolfo Stavenhagen proposes today ethnodevelopment or development with self-confidence, conscious that we need to 'look within' and 'search for one's own culture' instead of using borrowed and foreign views; when Jimoh Omo-Fadaka suggests a development from the bottom up, conscious that all strategies based on a top-down design have failed to reach their explicitly stated objectives; when Orlando Fals Borda and Anisur Rahman insist on participatory development, conscious of the exclusions made in the name of development; when Jun Nishikawa proposes an 'other' development for Japan, conscious that the current era is ending; when they and so many others qualify development and use the word with caveats and restrictions as if they were walking in a minefield, they do not seem to see the counter-productivity of their efforts. The minefield has already exploded.
In order for someone to conceive the possibility of escaping from a particular condition, it is necessary first to feel that one has fallen into that condition. For those who make up two-thirds of the world's population today, to think of development - of any kind of development - requires first the perception of themselves as underdeveloped, with the whole burden of connotations that this carries.
2nc overview
Vote negative – rejecting the plan’s unproblematic use of “development” is vital to opening a political contestation on the terms value and exposes the way in which it has become double-speak for political manipulation
Cornwall in 7 - Research Fellow in Participation and Development at the Institute of Development Studies - (Andrea, August 2007. “ Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse ” Development in Practice, Vol. 17. pp. 471-484. JSTOR.)
For those involved in development practice, reflection on words and their meanings may seem irrelevant to the real business of getting things done. Why, after all, should language matter to those who are doing development? As long as those involved in development practice are fam iliar with the catch-words that need to be sprinkled liberally in funding proposals and embla zoned on websites and promotional material, then surely there are more important things to be done than sit around mulling over questions of semantics? But language does matter for development. Development's buzzwords are not only passwords to funding and influence; and they are more than the mere specialist jargon that is characteristic of any profession. The word development itself, Gilbert Rist observes, has become a 'modern shibboleth, an una voidable password', which comes to be used 'to convey the idea that tomorrow things will be better, or that more is necessarily better'. But, as he goes on to note, the very taken-for-granted quality of 'development' - and the same might be said of many of the words that are used in development discourse - leaves much of what is actually done in its name unquestioned.
Many of the words that have gained the status of buzzwords in development are (or once were) what the philosopher W.B. Gallie (1956) termed 'essentially contested concepts': terms that combine general agreement on the abstract notion that they represent with endless disagreement about what they might mean in practice. Yet the very contestability of many of the words in the lexicon of development has been 'flattened', as Neera Chandhoke suggests for civil society: terms about which there was once vibrant disagreement have become 'consensual hurrah-words' (Chandhoke, this issue). Development's buzzwords gain their purchase and power through their vague and euphemistic qualities, their capacity to embrace a multitude of possible meanings, and their normative resonance. The work that these words do for develop ment is to place the sanctity of its goals beyond reproach.
Poverty is, of all the buzzwords analysed in this collection, perhaps the most compelling in its normative appeal; as John Toye notes, 'the idea of poverty reduction itself has a luminous obviousness to it, defying mere mortals to challenge its status as a moral imperative'. The moral unassailability of the development enterprise is secured by copious references to that nebulous, but emotive, category 'the poor and marginalised' (Cornwall and Brock 2005). Elizabeth Harrison draws attention to the 'righteous virtue' of anti-corruption talk, which she argues makes it virtually immoral to question what is being labelled 'corrupt', and by whom. Many of the words that describe the worlds-in-the-making that development would create have all the 'warmly persuasive' qualities that Raymond Williams described for community in his memorable 1976 book Keywords. Among them can be found words that admit no negatives, words that evoke Good Things that no-one could possibly disagree with. Some evoke futures possible, like rights-based and poverty eradication (Uvin, Toye). Others carry with them traces of worlds past: participation and good governance (Leal, Mkwandawire), with their echoes of colonial reformers like Lord Lugard, the architect of indirect rule; poverty, whose power to stir the do-gooding Western middle-classes is at least in part due to its distinctly nineteenth-century feel; and development itself, for all that it has become a word that Gilbert Rist suggests might be as readily abandoned as recast to do the work that it was never able to do to make a better world. Alongside words that encode seemingly universal values, the lexicon of development also contains a number of code-words that are barely intelligible to those beyond its borders. They are part of an exclusive and fast-changing vocabulary. These words capture one of the qualities of buzzwords: to sound 'intellectual and scientific, beyond the understanding of the lay person, best left to "experts"'(Standing, this issue). Some have their origin in the academy, their meanings transformed as they are put to the service of development. Among them social capital and gender are two such examples, with applications far distant from the theoretical debates with which they were originally associated (Fine and Smyth, this issue). Others circulate between domains as different in kind as the worlds that they make: business, advertising, religion, management. Take empowerment, a term that has perhaps the most expan sive semantic range of all those considered here. Advertisements beckoning consumers to 'empower' themselves by buying the latest designer spectacles mimic the individualism of the use of this term by development banks, just as the brand of 'spiritual empowerment' offered on the websites of the new Christianities lends radically different meaning to its uses by feminist activists to talk about collective action in pursuit of social justice (Batliwala, this issue). Buzzwords get their 'buzz' from being in-words, words that define what is in vogue. In the lexicon of development, there are buzzwords that dip in and out of fashion, some continuing to ride the wave for decades, others appearing briefly only to become submerged for years until they are salvaged and put to new uses. What we see, in some cases, is less the rise and rise of a term than its periodic resurfacing - evident, for example, in Buzzwords and fuzzwords account of changes and continuities in the language of British aid policies. Tracing the reinven tion of ideas, as well as words, over time brings into view some of the paradoxes of develop ment. Community and citizenship featured, for example, in the vocabularies of the 1950s colonists in Kenya who sought to 'rehabilitate' errant anti-colonial activists through community development programmes that would teach them to become responsible 'citizens' (Presley 1988). Community participation came into vogue in the 1970s, taking on an altogether different connotation in the 1980s as 'do it for yourself became 'do it by yourself as neo-liberalism flourished (Leal, this issue; Cornwall 2000). Toye's Angels are timeless, but their ministrations have their own historicity. Anti-poverty policies have genealogies that can be traced back over centuries: to take one example, Elizabethan provision of 'outdoor relief to those judged to be the 'deserving' poor, along with 'setting the poor on work', is not far distant from some of today's social protection policies described here by Guy Standing.1 Among words with familiar referents, there are others in this collection that have an entirely contemporary feel, keywords of the times we live in. Globalisation still captures the Zeitgeist, however much the term has come to be qualified in recent years (Guttal). Security (Luckham) has become emblematic of the new realities of development, and the increasingly polarised worlds that we have come to inhabit. Faith-based (Balchin) is a term whose apparent novelty disguises continuities between the three Cs of the age of colonialism (Civilisation, Christianity, and Commerce) and today's mainstream development - continuities that are increasingly visible. As part of the new world that has been constructed with the conjunction of development and security, talk of 'faith' has come to displace any debate about secularism, as Cassandra Balchin contends: 'today in international development policy, religion is simul taneously seen as the biggest developmental obstacle, the only developmental issue, and the only developmental solution' (this issue). And there are words, like peace-building, which Tobias Denskus compares to the 'non-places' such as airports and supermarkets described by Marc Auge (1995), that arrive in the ether and linger to enchant the consumers of development's latest must-have terms. The Development Dictionary brought together critical genealogies of the key concepts of the age to write the obituary of development. It is a sign of how far, and how fast, things have changed that there is so little overlap between the words that feature there and here. But many of the entries in The Development Dictionary appear in today's development discourse in new guises: state as fragile states (Osaghae) and good governance (Mkandawire); environ ment as sustainability (Scoones); planning (development institutions' preoccupation of that age) as harmonisation (Eyben) (their preoccupation in this one). Equality is as much of a concern as ever, but has come to be used in development more often with gender (Smyth) in front of it. Capacity building (Eade) transforms helping into a technical fix, generating its own entourage of 'experts'.
International NGOs have made much of a shift from needs to rights (Uvin). And progress continues to be regularly invoked, even as the hopes once associ ated with it quietly slip away. The apparent universality of the buzzwords that have come to frame 'global' development discourses masks the locality of their origins. Significantly, few of the words used in Anglo dominated development discourse admit of translation into other languages: many come to be used in other languages as loan-words, their meanings ever more closely associated with the external agencies that make their use in proposals, policies, strategies, and reports compul sory. Even the word 'buzzword' itself is peculiarly Anglophone. Gilbert Rist notes: / eventually decided to write this article in English, for the simple reason that 'buzzword' is just impossible to translate into French. It comes under what we call 'la langue de bois', whose translation into English does not exactly convey the same meaning.
La langue de bois, the language of evasion, well captures one of the functions of development's buzzwords. But, as Rist rightly observes, buzzwords do not just cloud meanings: they combine performative qualities with 'an absence of real definition and a strong belief in what the notion is supposed to bring about' When ideas fail, words come in very handy. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) The language of development is, as Fiona Wilson suggests, a hybrid, not quite the language of social science nor of 'living' English; its 'vocabulary is restricted, banal and depersonalised'. Its 'underlying purpose', she notes, 'is not to lay bare or be unequivocal but to mediate in the inter ests of political consensus while at the same time allowing for the existence of several internal agendas' (1992: 10). Policies depend on a measure of ambiguity to secure the endorsement of diverse potential actors and audiences. Buzzwords aid this process, by providing concepts that can float free of concrete referents, to be filled with meaning by their users. In the struggles for interpretive power that characterise the negotiation of the language of policy, buzzwords shelter multiple agendas, providing room for manoeuvre and space for contestation.
Using “Development” turns solvency- it produces flawed solutions
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 8)
Today, for two-thirds of the peoples of the world, underdevelopment is a threat that has already been carried out; a life experience of subordination and of being led astray, of discrimination and subjugation. Given that precondition, the simple fact of associating with development one's own intention tends to annul the intention, to contradict it, to enslave it. It impedes thinking of one's own objectives, as Nyerere wanted; it undermines confidence in oneself and one's own culture, as Stavenhagen demands; It clamours for management from the top down, against which Jimoh rebelled; it converts participation into a manipulative trick to involve people m struggles for getttng what the powerful want to impose on them, which was precisely what Fals Borda and Rahman wanted to avoid.
Development’s connotations of “evolution” create an illusion of progress that fails- kills solvency
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 22-23)
Development has evaporated. The metaphor opened up a field of knowledge and for a while gave scientists something to believe in. After some decades, it is clear that this field of knowledge is a mined, unexplorable land. Neither in nature nor in society does there exist an evolution that imposes transformation towards 'ever more perfect forms' as a law. Reality is open to surprise. Modern man has failed in his effort to be god. To root oneself in the present demands an image of the future. It is not possible to act here and now, in the present, without having an image of the next instant, of the other, of a certain temporal horizon. That image of the future offers guidance, encouragement, orientation, hope. In exchange for culturally established images, built by concrete men and women in their local spaces, in exchange for concrete myths, truly real, modern man was offered an illusory expectation, implicit in the connotation of development and its semantic network: growth, evolution, maturation, modernization. He was also offered an image of the future that is a mere continuation of the past: that is development, a conservative, if not reactionary, myth.
“development” = western dominance
Discourse centered around “development” prioritizes affluent Western culture and renders other nations inferior
Zein-Elabden Department of Economics, Franklin & Marshall College (Summer 2001. “ Contours of a non-modernist discourse: the contested space of history and development” Review of Radical Political Economies. Volume 33, Issue 3. ScienceDirect.)
Situating the postcolonial in relation to modernity has been perhaps the most difficult enterprise. This difficulty can be seen in the loss for words among many authors to articulate a vocabulary outside the parameters set by modern European discourse. Bhabha, for example, uses the expressions “otherwise than modernity” and “contra-modernity” (1994: 6). My use of the term “non-modernist” here is no exception. The difficulty of speaking outside the language of modernity originates in that modern Europe (to include European settlements worldwide) has largely succeeded, through material/discursive processes, in establishing a strong claim on “history” and, therefrom, all facets of human experience: reason/rationality, meaning, development, and of course modernity, appropriating all of these as uniquely European.5 Postcolonial thinkers themselves fall into this habit by ceding to modern Europe the majority of what could possibly be generically human and open to different cultural interpretations. 6
The imperial success of modern Europe, inseparable from its rise as an industrial power, laid the ground for its claim on history. This claim represents the discursive process that accompanied, and was perhaps necessary for, the rationalization and ideological purchase of modernity’s project of universal dominion. Thus, from a postcolonial perspective, the problem of modernist discourse lies not only in that it is centered around a linear, determinist interpretation of history, the (gendered) triumph of “reason,” and exceeding faith in an objective knowledge, but in claiming history itself for the European experience, and succeeding in defining the terms of “reality” and categories of discourse to the point where none could exist outside of its theoretical framework. In this framework, modernity became a condition inherently superior to age and tradition, with tradition being not the past of modern Europe, but also the present of non-European societies and cultures.
I wish to rely here on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (1997), one of the Subaltern Studies writers, to illustrate the problem of the European claim on history. 7 Chakrabarty is particularly concerned with the problem of the nation state, but his argument applies with equal precision to other categories of modernist discourse. He takes on the practice of historicism (interpreting history as a process that unfolds according to certain, immutable, and knowable a priori laws). So far such laws have been supplied by Western philosophy (for example, Hegel and Marx among a long line of less significant figures). Chakrabarty argues that historiography essentially entails a uniform application of European theories of history to all societies. Accordingly, history is perceived as “something which has already happened elsewhere [in Europe], and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content” (Ibid: 283). He goes on to show that this reproduction has, in fact, been faithfully carried out by “third world” historians and social scientists who are firmly caught up in the theoretical framework of “Europe as history.”
“Economics” and “history” are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world—the capitalist mode of production and the nation state. A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge. She or he therefore needs to understand the state on its own terms, that is, in terms of its self-justificatory narratives of citizenship and modernity. Since these themes will always take us back to the universalist propositions of “modern” (European) political philosophy—even the “practical” science of economics that now seems “natural” to our constructions of world systems is (theoretically) rooted in the ideas of ethics in eighteenth-century Europe—a third-world historian is condemned to knowing “Europe” as the original home of the “modern,” … . Thus follows the everyday subalternity of non-Western histories (Ibid: 285–6).
The captivity of postcolonial historians in the conceptual framework of Europe-as-history is reflected in what Chakrabarty calls “the paradox of third-world social science.” The paradox is that Western theories, written “in ignorance of the majority of humankind—that is, those living in non-Western cultures” (265), seem to illuminate many aspects of those societies for “third world” social scientists and “eminently” help in understanding their social problems. Chakrabarty finds the answer to his paradox to be that the reality illuminated by Western theories is present only in the minds of those social scientists who, having been thoroughly trained in Western tradition through the process of colonialism, share the European interpretations of history. Much more, they have accepted the negative characterization of their own cultures as permanently inadequate and undeveloped. In the classical Marxian interpretation, for instance, the British colonization of India—although condemned—was tolerated as the necessary evil of “modernization” and the transition to socialism.8
The modern European claim on history (interpreted as a teleological universalization of a particular rationality) finds its expression in contemporary economic analysis through the notion of development: namely, the form of large scale, material accumulation associated primarily with Western societies. In the 20th century postwar period, a tremendous investment in economic analysis as well as industrial projects was undertaken, and the notion of development has since been instituted in the binarism of developed/un(der/less)developed.9 The idea of development is, of course, deeply rooted in Western philosophical thought (see, for instance, Bury and Zein), but the imperative of its extension to other world regions draws particularly on the notion of universal history that emerged in eighteenth century Europe, and served to support the Enlightenment vision of progress by establishing universal laws according to which history unfolds. In Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Kant proposed a history in which nature brings about the development of all mankind (Teggart 1949). Similarly, Turgot in Discourses on Universal History envisioned the human race as one whole moving towards greater perfection (Bury 1932).
Contemporary economic analysis carried on this tradition. The classical Marxian theory in this regard has just been mentioned, and postmodern Marxian economists (e.g., Amariglio and Ruccio 1994) have already identified its historicism. Neoclassical economics, on the other hand, lacking a formalized theory of history, focused on individual “rationality” as the catalyst for development, set against the backdrop of a general stages-of-growth notion borrowed from classical economics. For example, in his influential—if now defunct—Stages of Economic Growth, Rostow (1960) deployed the notion of universal history to suggest that all societies followed the path of industrial Europe. Institutional economics did not rely on a teleological apprehension of historical change, but saw a path dependent co-evolution of technology and institutions. Nevertheless, its paradigmatic emphasis on the dynamic role of technological innovation lends itself to a bias towards industrialization as progress, and presents a constant tension with the role of culture in institutional economic analysis. 10
2. Why a non-modernist discourse?
The term non-modernist (rather than postmodernist) denotes an engagement with modernity from the subaltern position of its former colonies and marginalized others.11 What is most crucial from this position is that the modernity from which the postmodern departure might take place survives and currently exercises its premises, approaches, and material consequences for non-Western peoples and cultures. For postcolonial societies, the postmodern age has not meant a transcendence of European hegemony, to the same extent that it has not meant the end of economic exploitation and other capitalist processes in the industrialized world. Instead, many of these have expanded and accelerated through globalization and other “triumphs.”
A non-modernist discourse questions totalizing narratives, teleological understandings of history, and essentialist interpretations of subjectivity, and doubts objectified and universalized “reason,” “truth,” “knowledge,” and “reality.” Having said that, it should not be inferred that postmodernist critique logically extends to express the predicaments of cultures that represent the “other” of European modernity. Yes, the foundational elements of modernity that have been exposed by postmodernist literature underlay the project of colonialism and, through it, they unfolded brutally before the eyes of the colonized. However, their consequences and meanings to those in the colonies are not necessarily the same as to those living on the imperial side of modernity. Indeed, a desire to subsume the postcolonial critique of economic and political domination within the postmodern umbrella would amount to turning the Other into the Same, which, of course, postmodernism refuses to do (During 1987).
The problem of postcoloniality, rather than a loss of faith in the modern self, is the relentless sovereignty of European modernity, lived in the contemporary relationship between the formerly colonial and the now “postcolonial.” The physical end of the colonial era did not fundamentally alter this relationship. Colonialism was, almost smoothly, succeeded by the project of development through which former colonies were to oversee the reproduction of modern Europe on their own terrain (Zein-Elabdin 1998). 12 The project of development, from the standpoint of “to-be-developed” societies, represents a negative ontology, namely, a process that defines being by negation. The development discourse of the past half century theoretically negated the actual experiences of those societies on the premise that their present realities and world conceptions were a mere prelude to a more significant existence in the form of an industrial, materially affluent society
Rhetoric of “development” serves to prop up a system of Western dominance and superiority over the Third World
Pritchard 2k teaches western religious thought in the religion department at Bowdoin College and received her doctorate from Harvard. (2000. “ The Way Out West: Development and the Rhetoric of Mobility in Postmodern Feminist Theory ” Hypatia. Project Muse.)
Before I describe this Enlightenment narrative or logic of development, I must say a word about the phrase "narrative (or logic or discourse) of development." By this phrase I mean the ideological assumptions, associations, images, and metaphors that inform and justify meanings and practices of development. Narratives of development bear traces of philosophical, social, political, and economic genealogies. But deciphering such traces is no small feat. In attempting to define "development," Gustavo Esteva gives voice to the difficulty of this task: "There is nothing in modern mentality comparable to it [development] as a force guiding thought and behavior. At the same time, very few words are as feeble, as fragile and as incapable of giving substance and meaning to thought and behavior as this one" (Esteva 1992, 8). Similarly, Wolfgang Sachs asserts that "By now development has become an amoeba-like concept, shapeless but ineradicable. Its contours are so blurred that it denotes nothing--while it spreads everywhere because it connotes the best of intentions" (Sachs 1992, 4). It seems that many theorists would agree that development "is a normative term without an agreed definition" (Harrison 1988, 154). Its normativity consists in the fact that it is inseparable from a sense of improvement, advance, or progress. Indeed, Esteva concludes that development ". . . implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from the worse to the better" (Esteva 1992, 10). "Development" is, then, a capacious category. And, hence, any narrative which describes a change for the better may be taken as a narrative of development--even if the word "development" does not explicitly appear.
In the Enlightenment narrative of development that I shall describe, the root metaphor of development is mobility; more specifically, this narrative tells of an escape or exit from a locatedness that is deemed to be restrictive. 1 Locatedness suggests confinement, enclosure, or the stasis of "tradition." Consequently, [End Page 46] "development," in this schema, does not entail arriving at some particular "place." Indeed, a representation of what development should look like cannot be supplied; such an endeavor smacks of the closure and stasis, the territorial logic, associated with locative--that is, backward--parochial traditionalist thinking. To be enlightened, modern, and developed is to eschew all boundaries--boundaries bespeak backwardness. 2
When postmodern feminists deploy metaphors of mobility and displacement and repudiate the closure or fixity of patriarchy and/or modernity, they unwittingly betray the legacy of this Enlightenment logic of development. Postmodern feminist critiques of the Enlightenment have largely focused on disclosing the gender, race, and class biases of the supposedly "universal subject" of the Enlightenment. In so doing, these feminists have revealed the exclusive location of the vaunted "view from nowhere." This insight into the locatedness of the Enlightenment subject is, however, a perennial hobby of Enlightenment, that is, smoking out the parochialism of pretenders to the boundarylessness of the universal. Indeed, Enlightenment thinkers and postmodern feminists share a common language: the description of what they oppose or have left behind as static and closed and their siding with that which represents mobility and openness. For both, progress or development consists in a more extensive reach, a more dynamic and mobile subjectivity.
My aim in pointing out a rhetorical linkage between Enlightenment and postmodern feminist theory is not simply to argue that postmodernity is really modernity or to urge feminists to disavow all talk of movement. I wish neither to valorize Enlightenment nor to ignore the very real constraints imposed by various traditions. I am not simply inverting the binaries of mobility and stasis or Enlightenment and postmodernity. Rather I wish to focus attention upon the constellation of mobility, development, modernity and postmodernity, so that feminists may become "accountable for [our] investments in cultural metaphors and values" (Kaplan 1994, 139). Becoming accountable for such investments includes an examination of the concealed development logic that inheres in talk of mobility, a development logic that is recapitulated in the insistence upon the rupture of the so-called "post" modern. To examine such a logic requires that one linger a while over "Enlightenment" and avoid short-hand and dismissive readings of something one desperately wishes to get over, to get past, to get outside of, to develop beyond. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to an understanding of "how dominant power realizes itself through the very discourse of mobility" (Asad 1993, 10). To that end, I demonstrate how the discourse of mobility has provided rhetorical justification of Western development of the so-called Third World.
bell hooks hints at this concealed logic of development in feminists' use of metaphors of mobility when she insists that the language of "border-crossing" not be "evoked simply as a masturbatory mental exercise that condones the [End Page 47] movement of the insurgent intellectual mind across new frontiers [which is] (another version of the jungle safari)" (hooks 1994, 5). 3 hooks's self-conscious linkage of talk of border-crossing with a colonialist trope of the jungle safari conjures the specter of Western development of the so-called Third World. hooks does not pursue the implications of this correlation of metaphors of mobility and colonial development. These implications have also been overlooked in recent feminist and postmodern scholarship in development studies.
The word “development” drives a neverending need for economic progress, producing exploitation and oppression of the ‘Third World’
Escobar 95 - Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – (1995. “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.” Pgs. 3-4. Princeton University Press.)
This dream was not solely the creation of the United States but the result of the specific historical conjuncture at the end of the Second World War. Within a few years, the dream was universally embraced by those in power. The dream, was not seen as an easy process, however; predictably perhaps, the obstacles perceived ahead contributed to consolidating the mission. One of the most influential documents of the period, proposed by a group of experts coined by the United Nations "with the objective of designing concrete policies and measures "for the economic development of underdeveloped countries," put it thus:
There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped: old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. yet few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress.
The report suggested no less than a total restructuring of "underdeveloped" societies. The statement quoted earlier might seem to us today amazingly ethnocentric and arrogant, at hest naive; yet what has to be explained is precisely the fact that it was uttered and that it made perfect sense. The statement exemplified a growing will to transform drastically two-thirds of the world in the pursuit of the goal of material prosperity' and economic progress. By the early 19505. such a will had become hegemonic at the level of the circles of power.
This book tells the story of this dream and how it progressively turned into a nightmare. For instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950’s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition and violence are only the most pathetic signs of the failure of forty years of development. In this way, this book can be read as the history of the loss of an illusion. In which many genuinely believed. Above all, however, it is about how the third world has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post- World War II period.
Until the late 19705, the central stake in discussions on Asia, Africa, and Latin America was the nature of developer As we will see from the economic development theories of the 1950s the “basic human needs approach" of the 1970s-which emphasized not only economic growth per se as in earlier decades but also the distribution of the benefits of growth in main preoccupation of theorists and politicians was the kinds of development that needed to he pursued to solve the social and economic problems of these parts of the world. Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in time of the need for development, through concepts such as "another development," "participatory development” "socialist development," and. the. short, one could I' entlCIZC a gJven approach and propose modifications or Improvements accordingly, but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not! he doubted. Development had achieved the status of a certainty' in the social imaginary.
These representations of the Third World deny them an identity
Escobar 95 - Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – (1995. “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.” Pg 5. Princeton University Press.)
Critical work of this kind, Mudimbe believes, may open the way for "'the process of refounding and reassuming an interrupted historicity within representations" In other words, the process by which Africans can have greater autonomy over how they are represented and how they can construct their own social and cultural models in ways not so mediated by a "'Western episteme and historicity-albeit in an increasingly transnational context. This notion can be extended to the Third World as a whole, for what is at stake is the process by which, in the history of the modern West non-European areas have been systematically organized into, and transformed according to European constructs. Representations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as Third Word and underdeveloped are the heir of an illustrious genealogy of Western conceptions about those parts of the world.
Discourses of “development” create a false perception of the Third World as passive and powerless. This denies it history and value, and justifies Western dominance and control over it
Escobar 95 - Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – (1995. “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.” Pgs 8-9. Princeton University Press.)
Needless to say, Mohanty's critique applies with greater pertinence to mainstream development literature, in there exists veritable underdeveloped subjectivity endowed with features such as powerlessness, passibity, poverty, and ignorance, usually dark and lacking in historical agency as if waiting for the white Western hand to help subjects along and not infrequently hungry, illiterate, needy, and oppressed by its own stubbornness, lack of initiative, and traditions. This image also universalizes and homogenizes Third World cultures in an ahistorical fashion.
Only from a certain Western perspective does this description make sense, that it exists at all is more a sign of power over the Third World than a truth about it. It is important to highlight for now that the deployment of this discourse in a world system in which the West has a certain dominance over the Third world as a profound political, economic, and cultural effects that have to be explored.
The production of discourse under conditions of unequal power is what Mohanty and others refer to as "the colonialist move." This move entails specific constructions of the colonial! Third World subject in through discourse in ways that allow the exercise of power over it. Colonial discourse, although "the most theoretically underdeveloped form of discourse," according to Homi Bhahha, is "crucial to the binding of a range of differences and discriminations that inform the discursive, and political practices of racial and cultural hierarchization" (1990, 72). Bhabha;s definition of colonial discourse, although complex, is illuminating:
[Colonial discoursel is an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a "subject peoples" through the production or knowledge in term~ of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/ unpleasure is incited .... The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to estahlish systems of administration and instruction ... I am referring to a form of govemmentality that in marking out a "subject nation," appropriatcs, directs and dominates its various spheres of activity. (1990, 75)
Although some of the terms of this definition might be more applicahle to the colonial context strictly speaking, the development discourse is governed by the same principles; it has created an extremely efficient apparatus or producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World. This apparatus came into existence roughly in the period 1945 to 19.5.5 and has not since ceased to produce new arrangements of knowledge and power, new practices, theories, strategies, and so on. In sum, it has successfully deployed a regime of government over the Third World, a "space for 'subject peoples'" that ensures certain control over it.
“development”= west first
Their use of the “development” evokes ideas of evolution of the industry, making all those underdeveloped in industry seem “inhuman”- this creates a west first dichotomy
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 8)
In common parlance, development describes a process through which the potentialities of an object or organism are released, until It reaches Its natural, complete, full-nedged form. Hence the metaphoric use of the term to explain the natural growth of plants and animals. Through this metaphor, It became possible to show the goal of development and, much later, Its programme. The development or evolution of living beings, in biology, referred to the process through which organisms achieved their genetic potential: the natural form of the being pre-seen by the biologist. Development was frustrated whenever the plant or the animal failed to fulfill its genetic programme, or substituted for It another. In such cases of failure, its growth was not development but rather an anomaly: pathological, and even anti-natural behaviour. The study of these 'monsters' became critical for the formulation of the first biological theones.
It was between 1759 (Wolff) and 1859 (Darwin) that development evolved from a conception of transformation that moves toward the appropriate form of being to a conception of transformation that moves towards an ever more perfect form. During this period, evolution and development began to be used as interchangeable terms by scientists. The transfer of the biological metaphor to the social sphere occurred in the last quarter of the 18th century. Justus Moser, the conservative founder of social history, from 1768 used the word Entwicklung to allude to the gradual process of social change. When he talked about the transformation of some political situations, he described them almost as natural processes. In 1774, Herder started to publish his interpretation of universal history, tn which he presented global correlations by comparing the ages of life with social history. But he went beyond this comparison, applying to hls elaborations the organological notion of development coined in the scientific discussions of his time. He frequently used the image of the germ to describe the development of organizational forms. By the end of the century, based on the biological scale of Bonnet he tried to combine the theory of nature with the philosophy of history in an attempt to create a systematic and consistent unity . . Historical development was the continuation of natural development, according to him; and both were just variants of the homogeneous development of the cosmos, created by God. Towards 1800, Entwicklung began to appear as a reflexive verb. Self-
development became fashionable. God, then, started to disappear in the popular conception of the universe. And a few decades later, all possibilities were opened to the human Subject, author of his own development, emancipated from the divine design. Development became the central category of Marx's work: revealed as a historical process that unfolds with the same necessary character of natural laws. Both the Hegelian concept of history and the Darwinist concept of evolution were interwoven in development,
reinforced with the scientific aura of Marx. When the metaphor returned to the vernacular, it acquired a violent
colonizing power, soon employed by the politicians. It converted history into a programme: a necessary and inevitable destiny. The industrial mode of production, which was no more than one, among many, forms of social life, became the definition of the terminal stage of a unilinear way of social evolution. This stage came to be seen as the natural culmination of the potentials already existing in neolithic man, as his logical evolution. Thus history was reformulated in Western terms.
The metaphor of development gave global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to define the forms of their social life. The vernacular sequence (development is possible after envelopment) was inverted with the transfer. Scientific laws took the place of God in the enveloping function, defining the programme. Marx rescued a feasible initiative, based on the knowledge of those laws. Truman took over this perception, but transferred the role of prime mover -the
primum movens condition - from the communists and the proletariat to the experts and to capital (thus, ironically, following the precedents set by Lenin and Stalin).
“development” = colonialist
The discourse of “Development” encourages colonialism- it creates a civilizing mission
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Since the demise of the colonial legitimization of the "civilizing" mission, "development" has come to express the contemporary challenge of bringing the benefits of "civilization" and human progress to the populations of the world. It is, it appears, the primary purpose of human endeavor to be collectively undertaken by all and sundry within the context of a humanity-embracing, "new," post-colonial, "world-order"-- another "new beginning." Through many ups and downs, through many failures and too few successes, the spirit of development as a great human cause has been kept alive. Now we must do everything we can to 'turn that spirit into practical, visible progress for people in Africa, and people everywhere. Development is everyone's job. No more fundamental cause exists today. I believe that we stand at the start of a time of unique achievement.19 So many possible audiences stand to be identified by this appeal of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations for the "job" of "development." To the leaders of the world is made the plea to revitalize efforts toward the implementation of development initiatives. To the doubters of the "development" project is made the reassurance that now, despite the "many ups and downs," the spirit and vision of development still rings true and firm. To himself and his staff of the development-related institutions of the UN, perhaps the audience for which the statement is truly intended, is made the reassertion that this work of development is an important one. They, the development workers, have the historic role of ensuring the realization of this vision of human progress, and so much futility and even failure may be erased or forgotten through a renewed commitment to carry on persistently with their tasks. All this expression of angst and hope is, of course, nothing new. Like a social ritual played out with consistent regularity, we have become familiar with these gatherings of "developmentalists," at which they administer healthy measures of both admonishments for past failures and encouragements for future hope. And like in all rituals, processes of "remembering," which are the public face of proceedings, are accompanied by the equally important processes of "forgetting." Repeated and remembered are the "failures," the commitments to "humanity," the conditions of suffering that are deemed "intolerable," and the articulations of hope in future "action." Ignored and forgotten are the violence of the failures, the fraudulence of the commitments, the processes of inflicted suffering deemed necessary, and the articulations of despair about past actions. Still, the ritual performs a regenerative purpose. It recasts anew the project of development with all its civilizational importance and reassures its practitioners of their historic mission to "order" society. But what is the message given to the "victims" of development-those who, although intended as the beneficiaries of this universal project, have had to suffer the "many failures and too few successes" as these rituals are enacted? 20 To them is made a plea for patience and a rearticulation of a vision for tomorrow. For them, however, perhaps a different experience of developmental (mis)orderings persists, one which bears a striking resemblance to the earlier phase of colonial ordering. While once colonialism was blatant in its dehumanizing of social relationships, notwithstanding the claims of the "civilizing mission," now that same dehumanization takes place under the acceptable, if not desirable, guise of globalized development. The "poor" has come to replace the "savage/native;" the "expert consultant," the "missionary;" "training seminars," mass "baptizing;" the handphone in the pocket, the cross on the altar. But some things-the foreigner's degree, attire, consumer items, etc.- don't change. And what of the "comprador elites," that band of minority mercenaries who symbolized to the colonialist all that was good about what it meant to be the servile "civilized," who served as the faithful mouthpieces of the master? Today, many go by the names of "government functionaries" and "entrepreneurs." Regenerated by these contemporary ideological weapons of the desired human condition, the processes of ordering, of creating orders of inhumanity, carry on with violence intact. Contrary to assumptions of a lack of order and non-inclusion, many of the "conditions" of human suffering that justify developmental interventions
result from a very considerable amount of ordering and forced inclusion. Processes of ordering, as coercive command, are visible in the perpetuation and exacerbation of food insecurity resulting from structures instituted during the colonial period and carried through to the globalizing practices of international agri-business (the globalization of hunger),21 the impact of the invasion of transnational corporations on the environmental and social fabric
of communities (the globalization of ecocide),22 the societal disintegration
resulting from structural adjustment policies and the imperatives of the
transnational economic system (the globalization of impoverishment),23 and the resulting destruction of social diversity through the homogenization of "pop" and consumer culture (the globalization of social alienation). These have all contributed to the marginalization of populations following half a century of (violent) "development."24 How many more "new beginnings" of "development" are necessary before the embodied "world" that is the result of
all this ordering is recognized as a familiar one from earlier times? After five decades of "development," the following description by Frantz Fanon of the colonial condition still rings true of the contemporary "post-colonial," "globalized" neighborhood, and of its inhabitants: The settler's town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings,
unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by
strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things.... The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession-all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler's place.25
AT: discourse doesn’t matter
Re-evaluation of the discourse of the word “development” is necessary to reverse historical trends of Western domination over the Third World and the social construction of underdeveloped nations.
Escobar 95 - Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – (1995. “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.” Pgs. 3-4. Princeton University Press.)
Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms. Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories and nauseam. The fact that most people's conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to bother most experts. Reality in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed.
More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s hut the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made possible analyses of this type of colonization of reality which week to account for this very fact: how certain representation become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Foucault’s work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of disCourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Extensions of Foucault's insigts to colonial and postcolonial situations hy authors such as Edward Said, V Y. ~fudimhe, Chandra Mohant:.~ and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking about representations of the Third World. Anthropology's self-critique and renewal during the 1980s have also been important in this regard.
Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination-as earlier analyses, for instance, did-and at the same time to explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibilities and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates' the possibility of standing detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated" (Foucault 1986, 3), It gives us the possibility of singling out "development" as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form. This is the task the present book sets out to accomplish.
To see development as a historically produced discourse entails an examination0f why so many countries started to see themselves as underdeveloped in the early post-World War II period, how "to develop" became a fundamental problem for them, and how, finally, they embarked upon the task of un-underdeveloping" themselves by subjecting their societies to increasingly systematic, detailed, and comprehensive interventions. As '''Western experts and politicians started to see certain conditions in Asia, Africa., and Latin America as a problem-mostly what was perceived as poverty And backwardness – a new domain of thought and experience, namely, development, came into being, resulting in a new strategy for dealing with the alleged problems. Initiated in the United States and Western Europe, this strategy became in a few years a powerful force in the Third World.
AT: but we don’t mean that!
Intended meaning is obvi not relevant for this argument – you may have not “meant” to link to the politics DA either, but your intentionality in that matter had equally little influence in us reading the DA
History is key to understanding connotations
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 8)
Development occupies the centre of an incredibly powerful semantic constellation. There is nothing in modern mentality comparable to it as a force guiding thought and behaviour. At the same time, very few words are as feeble, as fragile and as incapable of giving substance and meaning to thought and behaviour as this one.
Even if they are giving a different meaning to development- Societal acceptance means development is linked to something concrete in human relations
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 11-12)
The very discussion of the origin or current causes of underdevelopment illustrates to what extent it is admitted to be something real, concrete, quantifiable and identifiable: a phenomenon whose origin and modalities can be the subject of investigation. The word defines a perception. This becomes, in turn, an object, a fact. No one seems to doubt that the concept does not allude to real phenomena. They do not realize that it is a comparative adjective whose base of support is the assumption, very Western but unacceptable and undemonstrable, of the oneness, homogeneity and linear evolution of the world, It displays a falsification of reality produced through dismembering the totality of interconnected processes that make up the world's reality and, in its place, it substitutes one of its fragments, isolated from the rest, as a general point of reference.'
AT: re-appropriation
Re-appropriation fails- empirics prove- any other use contradicts the very meaning of the word
Esteva, 92 Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca
(Gustavo, “The Development Dictionary A Guide to Knowledge as Power”, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, pg 15-16)
The experts of Unesco, for their part, promoted the concept of endogenous development. For some time, this conception won more acceptance than all the others. It seemed clearly heretical, openly contradicting the conventional wisdom. Emerging from a rigorous critique of the hypothesis of development 'in stages' (Rostow), the thesis of endogenous development rejected the necessity or possibility -let alone suitability - of mechanically imitating industrial societies. Instead, it proposed taking due account of the particularities of each nation. Little acknowledged, however was the fact that this sensible consideration leads to a dead-end in the very theory and practice of development, that it contains a contradiction in terms. If the impulse is truly endogenous, that is, if the initiatives really come out of the diverse cultures and their different systems of values, nothing would lead us to believe that from these would necessarily arise development - no matter how it is defined - or even an impulse leading in that direction. If properly followed, this conception leads to the dissolution of the very notion of development, after realizing the impossibility of imposing a single cultural model on the whole world - as a conference of Unesco experts pertinently recognized in 1978.
**Aff
AT: “development”
Development’s meaning should be determined contextually- “Development” can be re-appropriated
Mphande, 05 Lecturer in International Community Development at the University of Victoria (15 -18 November 2005, Charles, International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory into Research, “Encumbering Development: Development Discourse as Hegemonic Resources in the Developing World”, SW)
A worthwhile starting point in tackling the complexities of development is to clarify conceptions of development and their strategies in context. Indeed the term and concept development itself remains elusive to definition (see Baster 1972; Mabogunje 1989; Patterson 1999; Rist 1997; Schech and Haggis 2000; Seers 1972) even though development has grown to be a thriving activity with experts of various interests. Ellis and Biggs’ (2001) chronological study of the concepts of development that have been in use since the end of World War II, and Patterson’s (1999) historical examination of metaphors and analogies of social change and development thought that have been used from classical times to the present attest to the variety of shades of meaning that development, as a preoccupation with improvement of quality of life, can assume in various contexts and time periods. Remenyi (2004) has gone further to give an account of the chequered historical course of development thought that has led to the people- centred view taking centre stage today (see also UNDP 1996). Remenyi (2004) advances a people-centred view of development that incorporates good governance and human rights as instruments within a poverty alleviation focus, as a “challenge to revise thinking on development” (p23). Such a call to revision of development thought is an indication of how development lends itself to multiple conceptualisations and interpretations. Analyses of various conceptualisations of development in contexts of social practices would help to cast some light on factors that contribute to inefficacies of various development strategies.
1NC “Eaarth”
Renaming the planet “Eaarth” makes people aware of the environmental changes that have occurred and helps us stop the infinite growth that kills the environment
Jowit, 10 The Observer’s Environmental Editor (4/23/10, Juliette, Huffington Post, “Veteran climate campaigner calls for renaming of planet Earth”, SW)
Humans have changed the planet so drastically that it needs a new name, claims one of the first environmental campaigners to warn the public about climate change."Eaarth" is the name being suggested by author and activist Bill McKibben, and is the title of his latest book. The new name is changed just a little because the world looks like the familiar planet Earth, but is different in fundamental ways, McKibben told the Guardian. "It's a conceit: the notion that we're living on a planet a lot like our own, the one we were born on, but different enough to need a new name," said McKibben, who thinks the new name should sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger would pronounce it in his deep Austrian-American drawl. McKibben describes how he played with the spelling of Earth, adding different letters, and chose his new name because he liked the look of it best: "There's a slightly science fiction look to it; that's appropriate in the sense it's a little like a science fiction story: we wake up one day and the planet we have been used to for 10,000 years has 5% more moisture in the atmosphere, the sea is turning more acid. The only trouble is it's not fiction." McKibben knows better than most people that the planet has not changed overnight: the science of the greenhouse effect which creates global warming has been understood since the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, and the American author himself came to fame in 1989 with one of the first books for the general public warning about climate change, The End of Nature, which was translated into more than 20 languages. For generations humans have muttered that the world is changing; but this time the change is more physical, and measurably faster and stronger, says McKibben. "For most human generations very little has changed. In the last century ... one of the things that made it possible to have absorbed tremendous social change was the fact that the planet was pretty [physically] stable. That physical stability is now at an end and this century we'll feel the physical planet changing as violently and tremendously as the social planet did in the last century." To back up the claims, Eaarth, which appears in the US this month and in the UK in May, quotes many and wide-ranging examples of physical change: 17 of the 20 warmest years on record were in the last two decades; tropical storms are stronger; droughts are more frequent; dengue fever in Texas is just one example of diseases spreading around the world; much of the planet's ice is melting; and sea levels are rising. But for McKibben the dramatic set-up is only that: "Most of the book is devoted to the question: if we're on a new planet how are we going to live on it?" he asks. "It's a different planet: we'll have to have different habits in order to inhabit it successfully, and some of those will be pretty radical." McKibben is the founder of the campaign group , which on 24 October 2009 organised 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, an event he says was described by CNN as "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history". However, the book argues that although they will "keep battling" for drastic emission reductions to lessen the impacts of climate change, they have "lost the fight, insofar as our goal was to preserve the world we were born into." For that reason, McKibben offers some guidance for living on planet Eaarth: "The thing it will require of us, above all, is to leave behind the idea infinite growth will solve all our problems and start thinking about scaling down, relocalising much of our economic life to make it more resilient and less vulnerable to the kind of disruptive change we're now seeing." Examples, says McKibben, include the Transition Towns network of communities trying to live without fossil fuels, which began in the UK. In the US, the number of farms has risen in the last five years, after a generation of decline, farmers' markets are growing, and solar energy is being installed even in the author's notoriously cold home state of Vermont, he said. The book urges people not to despair of the bad news: "My only real fear is that the reality described in this book, and increasingly evident in the world around us, will be for some an excuse to give up," he writes. "We need just the opposite - increased engagement."
We should call it “Eaarth”- This is key to raise awareness about the earth’s changing climate and generate environmental movement
McKibben 10 author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign , which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009, and frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times (4/16/10, Bill, , Interview with Jed Lipinski, "Eaarth": Earth is over”, SW)
The meaning behind the title is that we really have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But it’s substantially different. There’s 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than there was 50 years ago, much less ice at the top of the Earth, et cetera. Calling it "Eaarth," an admittedly weird word, is a way of calling people’s attention to the fact that the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago.
notes
Say it like Schwarzenegger would
Jowit, 10 The Observer’s Environmental Editor (4/23/10, Juliette, Guardian Environment Blog, “Bill McKibben calls out to Eaarthlings to rename our planet”, SW)
The first question is how on earth do you say Eaarth? As Terminator-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would say it, McKibben told the Guardian – "aaaarff".
2NC solvency
We need to think of Earth differently
Jowit, 10 The Observer’s Environmental Editor (4/23/10, Juliette, Guardian Environment Blog, “Bill McKibben calls out to Eaarthlings to rename our planet”, SW)
Ecologist Bill McKibben has an idea: to rename our planet. Humans have changed what was Earth so fundamentally, we should start thinking of it as something different, argues the American author and campaigner.
Our view of “Eaarth” ENCOURAGES hope that we can fix this problem- the affirmative relies on a false hope
McKibben, 10 author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign , which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009, and frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times (4/23/10, Bill, Climate Progress, Excerpt from EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, “Bill McKibben on ‘Eaarth’ Day”, SW)
Which doesn’t mean that the change we must make or the world on the other side will be without its comforts or beauties. Reality always comes with beauty, sometimes more than fantasy. But hope has to be real. It can’t be a hope that the scientists will turn out to be wrong, or that President Barack Obama can somehow fix everything. Obama can help but precisely to the degree he’s willing to embrace reality, to understand that we live on the world we live on, not the one we might wish for. Maturity is not the opposite of hope; it’s what makes hope possible.
A2: perm
“Eaarth” solves because its unfamiliarity drives us to action- trying to stick with the current name means we can feel comfortable doing nothing
McKibben, 10 author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign , which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009, and frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times (4/23/10, Bill, Climate Progress, Excerpt from EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, “Bill McKibben on ‘Eaarth’ Day”, SW)
And so EAARTH is, by necessity, less philosophical than its predecessor. We need now to understand the world we’ve created, and consider urgently how to live in it. We can’t simply keep stacking boulders against the change that’s coming on every front; we’ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations. There’s nothing airy or speculative about this conversation; it’s got to be uncomfortable, staccato, direct.
Attempting to hold on to our old “earth” makes environmental action fail
Atcheson, 10 His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals (5/22/10, John, Climate Progress, “Review of Bill Mckibben’s must-read book “Eaarth””, SW)
The world, including many who have been tireless advocates of climate action, will likely reject McKibben’s diagnosis and his prescription — hoping against hope that we can return to Earth and have what we’ve always had by slapping a green veneer over the massive consumption machine that is our contemporary economy. But they fool only themselves. We are now on planet Eaarth, and much of out talent, capital and time will be spent coping with this harsher, less forgiving new world.
**Aff
AT: “eaarth”
Eaarth doesn’t solve- too close to the original
Jowit, 10 The Observer’s Environmental Editor (4/23/10, Juliette, Guardian Environment Blog, “Bill McKibben calls out to Eaarthlings to rename our planet”, SW)
And why not change it more? It seems rather indulgent to write a whole book about this idea and only add one vowel. McKibben, who admits he liked the sci-fi look of the word, says it reflects the fact that the planet in question is "a lot like our own ... but different enough".
1NC “Exploration”
The word exploration invokes the memory of frontierism- It links exploration to nationalism
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
If 18th century audiences came to accept the lofty trait of curiosity as a driving force behind voyages of discovery, 19th century audiences found deeper impulses behind humanity’s urge to explore. In particular, the Romantic Movement gave rise to ideas central to the ethos of modern exploration. The first of these was that discovery is a process that includes, but is not contained by, practical pursuits. While geographical discovery, science, and resource extraction all have their parts to play, exploration has an intangible, ineffable quality that cannot simply be reduced to logical goals. The second idea (which follows closely from the first) was that the value of exploration is tied to the subjective experience of the explorer, a symbol for the nation at home [14]. 2.2. Exploration in American history By contrast, Lewis and Clark’s 1804 Corps of Discovery did not carry much symbolic weight in the 19th century. While it succeeded in most of its scientific and political goals, the expedition returned with few specimens and was slow to publish its results. Consequently Lewis and Clark’s exploits only became famous at the beginning of the 20th century. More broadly speaking, however, Americans had begun to accept the patriotic and Romantic meanings of exploration. As a result, the US government increasingly sponsored expeditions on missions symbolic as well as practical after 1830. Congress now looked to exploration as a means of enhancing national reputation, not simply a way to advance military or commercial objectives. Starting with the departure of the US Exploring Expedition to the Pacific in 1838, the USA pursued a series of international discovery expeditions. In these endeavors science remained an important expeditionary goal. US expeditions put on their best face, sailing with corps of ‘‘scientifics’’ to advance geographical knowledge and, in the process, to persuade other nations that the USA was more than a republic of untutored farmers. In short, pursuit of knowledge gave US expeditions symbolic heft. It ushered the United States into an enlightenment tradition of imperial voyaging and e its organizers hoped e into the ranks of civilized nations [15]. As the USA became a nation of cities, railways, and stockyards in the late 1800s, Americans looked back nostal- gically to their itinerant and expeditionary past, celebrating exploration figures such as Christopher Columbus at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 and Lewis and Clark (who were still relatively unknown) at the Lewis and Clark Cente- nary of 1905. While 19th century Americans had been eager to identify themselves as people of culture and civilization, 20th century Americans were more inclined to revel in, and embellish, their buckskin past, weaving the idea of the frontier into a story of American progress. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner first advanced this idea in 1893 in his famous essay ‘‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History.’’ [16]. Today the Turnerian spirit is alive and well, reflected in the broad range of people and activities linked to exploration. As space historian Roger Launius argues, Turner’s frontier thesis has been particularly popular within NASA. ‘‘Americans have always moved towards new frontiers,’’ wrote NASA Adminis- trator James Fletcher in 1987, ‘‘because we are, above all, a nation of pioneers with an insatiable urge to know the unknown. Space is no exception to that pioneering spirit.’’ [17].
The language of exploration and the frontier fundamentally determines the space program by defining political power and providing moral justifications for state actions.
Fernau 9. (Fletcher, research coordinator at the JJP VA Center. Former administrative support at American University, advised by Dr. Peter Howard, adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service at American University. “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context: How Have Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?” . Capstone Project for Honors in International Studies, May, 2009. ps)
Exploring uncharted space was explicitly part of the definition of Kennedy’s New Frontier, giving it a spatial dimension. The speech was not a space policy speech, it was about the nomination and the campaign, but it set the tone for much of Kennedy’s later public rhetoric. The evocation of the frontier would occur again and again as Kennedy spoke about space.
Historian Richard Slotkin describes the reasoning behind the choice of the frontier as a symbol for the Kennedy campaign:
For Kennedy and his advisors, the choice of the Frontier as a symbol was not simply a device for trade-marking the candidate. It was an authentic metaphor, descriptive of the way in which they hoped to use political power and the kinds of struggle in which they wished to engage. The “Frontier” was for them a complexly resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales—each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the state of historical conflict.
The goal of Kennedy’s rhetoric was to persuade the nation as a whole to buy into the heroic narrative of the frontier. Kennedy said he stood on “what was once the last frontier.” The past tense is significant for, he asserted, a new frontier challenged the United States. Kennedy presented his rhetorical new frontier as a challenge to national greatness. The nominee and future president was calling on Americans to be pioneers who would take on the challenge presented by the new frontier with energy and courage. Slotkin concerns his work with the link between the mythology of the frontier and violence in American culture, but this study concerns itself with the link between the frontier and legitimating the expense and effort required by the national space program.
The rhetorical commonplace that won the 1960 presidential election was Kennedy’s new frontier, not Eisenhower and Nixon’s scientific plan. Its victory would have lasting consequences for how the space program would evolve, what it would have to do, and what it could not do.
Having described how Kennedy settled on the frontier as a rhetorical commonplace to draw upon in articulating his policies, specifically his space program, the next step is to understand how and why the frontier came to have the rhetorical power it possessed.
History
The concept of the frontier threads its way throughout the history of the United States. It is deeply connected with the utopian impulse in American culture. That impulse runs deep, as Launius and McCurdy note, “the concept of America as a Utopia in the making has permeated the national ideology since before the birth of the republic.”
The United State sees itself as a nation of progress; a nation characterized by optimism. This progressive spirit may spring in large part from the European Enlightenment, but unlike in hidebound Europe the New World offered a clean slate. It offered the frontier.
In reality the Americas were not as clean a slate as the frontier myth would have us believe. The unhappy fate of the indigenous peoples of the “New” World is not focused on in this project, but is extensively examined in the work of Richard Slotkin as well as Todorov’s The Conquest of America, to name just two excellent examples. See also Robert Frost’s poem America is Hard to See.
Vagueness NB
Using the word “exploration” without defining the purpose of it is vague and kills solvency
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
The optimal strategy for US space exploration has recently been the subject of some decidedly revisionist thinking, manifested in the February 2008 workshop ‘‘Examining the Vision: Balancing Science and Exploration’’ sponsored by Stanford University and the Planetary Society [3]. Human space exploration was defined implicitly by the participants with an implementation plan e to wit ‘‘the purpose of sus- tained human exploration is to go to Mars and beyond’’. This, and also the view that science is a beneficiary of human space flight but is not its primary motivation, is consistent with the thinking of the Aldridge Commission. This consistency became a matter of revisionism here because, following the Aldridge Report with its broad set of science goals, the NASA exploration enterprise subsequently became narrowly focused on lunar return. While these statements provide context, they do little to advance our deeper understanding of exploration and its implications for space policy. The CAIB report defined Columbia’s astronauts as explorers even though the crew never left low-Earth orbit, a region traveled by hundreds of other astronauts prior to STS-107. In what sense then were they ‘‘pushing back . a frontier’’ as specified in the Aldridge Report? Or is the notion of exploration as travel to places never visited too limiting? After all, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest brought them to a place never visited, whereas Charles Darwin followed in the foot- steps of hundreds of others when he made his world-changing discoveries in the Galapagos Islands. Does this make Hillary and Norgay explorers to the exclusion of Darwin? [4]. Despite these ambiguities in meaning, it is still emphasized by many that the USA is a nation founded by explorers, and that, however troubling their legacy might be, those explorers have instilled in us a national ‘‘spirit of exploration’’. A discussion about the definition of ‘‘exploration’’ can, in prin- ciple, devolve into a comparison of dictionary definitions, and that is not very satisfying. Were we to do this, we would quickly find that the verb ‘‘explore’’ is defined (as per the Oxford English dictionary) as to: (1) travel through an unfa- miliar area in order to learn about it; (2) inquire into or discuss in detail; and (3) examine by touch. Two of these would apply to human space flight. By these definitions, one might argue that exploration involves little more than walking into the woods a few hundred yards from home and planting tracks on a few square inches of ground that might never have been touched by human feet. This seems absurd, of course. Such definitions could even be rendered irrelevant by Chief Justice Potter Stewart’s ‘‘I know it when I see it’’ test (which he famously used to define obscenity) [5]. Such a test, in which exploration is defined at gut-level, seems endemic to practical modern views of space exploration. Yet it is an absurdity which makes the point clear: definitions offer little help in understanding the constellation of meanings which surround modern exploration [6]. These may seem like semantic questions, but there are perils which await the US space program if it chooses to base a program on exploration, and yet leaves the meaning of the word unexamined. As NASA moves from policy statements to implementation goals and mission metrics, the ambiguity of exploration continues to play out in debates over goals and outcomes. The question for NASA is not ‘‘What is the true meaning of exploration?’’ but rather ‘‘What kind of explora- tion should we pursue?’’ We do not presume to answer either question here but, rather, hope to prepare the way for the debate which must follow: first, by looking at the different meanings of exploration and their historical precedents; second, by examining some of the hidden assumptions in exploration policy and its implications for the VSE.
Ext. Vagueness
Vague objectives about the PURPOSE of space policy mean the plan fails – It makes specific decisions impossible and leads to fights over implementation
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
Yet this ambiguity comes with a price. If it makes it easier to craft policy and pass space budgets, it makes later decisions, such as policy implementation and mission metrics, more difficult. Five years after the announcement of VSE and four years after the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), broad disagreement remains about core concepts in US space exploration. While VSE and the reports detailing and extending it deserve praise for being visionary and ambitious, they have also ‘‘kicked the can down the road’’, delaying, rather than resolving, debates about the ultimate goals of space exploration.
Robots NB
Use of the word exploration invokes exploration as a “human” achievement- This kills the use of more efficient, cost-effective robotic missions
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
Yet, for others, humans remain vital to a modern vision of exploration. According to Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman, exploration has to involve risk in distant places. Or, as he puts it, ‘‘Exploration’’ 1⁄4 ‘‘Adventure’’ þ ‘‘Discovery’’. To him, astronomy with telescopes is perhaps not a form of exploration at all. Astronomers would be seriously perturbed by such an outlook, however. One might make the case that even for an astronaut standing on Mars, surveying terrain that represents this new frontier is using light to do so, just as astronomers use light to survey more distant frontiers. Within the political sphere, space exploration gains its relevance largely through symbolism, both as a human quest and a geopolitical strategy. Of the half dozen campaign speeches that mentioned space flight at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, none mentioned science. For all of them space flight was useful as a measure of human (and more specifically American) achievement. In the Republican campaign arena, John McCain’s policy statement about exploration was quite revealing: Although the general view in the research community is that human exploration is not an efficient way to increase scientific discoveries given the expense and logistical limitations, the role of manned space flight goes well beyond the issue of scientific discovery and is a reflection of national power and pride [22]. In the national conversation about the meaning of space exploration, not much has changed since the Augustine Commission considered these questions in 1990 [23]. ‘‘Some point out that most space science missions can be performed with robots for a fraction of the cost of humans’’, they said, ‘‘and that therefore the manned space program should be curtailed. Others point out that the involvement of humans is the essence of exploration, and that only humans can fully adapt to the unexpected.’’ Despite the impressive edifice of VSE, then, US space policy is being built on shifting ground.
“Exploration” is symbolic of human achievement- prevents congress from adopting Robot Missions
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
Yet comparing robotic and human exploration in this manner is of limited use. We can calculate how much robotic science could be done with a VSE budget, of course, but it is doubtful that Congress would ever authorize such vast sums for robotic exploration. For almost two centuries, the federal government has adopted a vision of exploration that is symbolic as well as practical. However impressive have been the gains of robotic exploration, it is unlikely that Congress or NASA will abandon human space flight on purely practical grounds to focus solely on scientific goals.
Human space travel fails- Robots are more efficient
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
How much does this land bias influence the current goals of the VSE? As the Moon becomes the new, rocky grail of US exploration, which ‘‘vision of exploration’’ will the national strategy follow? NASA has made it clear that science has a role to play in the VSE. Yet, while the planetary science community has agreed that further studies of the Moon could offer new insights into the history of our Solar System and of the formation of our Earth, the scientific importance of in situ human exploration there, as opposed to robotic efforts, has not been convincingly demonstrated. What guides NASA’s plan for extended occupation at a lunar ‘‘outpost’’ when access to widely spaced locations on the lunar surface, perhaps by robots, might be more useful for lunar science? From scientific and budgetary points of view, one could make a case that NASA should abandon the human lunar outpost idea altogether and invest its money in telerobotic exploration of the Moon, a project that would cost a fraction of a manned outpost. The same can be said for the exploration of Mars. Even as NASA considers long range plans to send a human spacecraft to the red planet, Martian surface probes Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix have underscored the value of robotic exploration. While it has been noted that a human can do in one day what a robot can do in a month, it should be kept in mind that 30 robots would probably cost less than one human. If cost-efficient planetary science is our measure of mission success, robotic exploration has set the bar for VSE very high, and Moore’s Law suggests that the bar is getting higher.
Space col good NB
Use of the term “exploration” implies using land- that causes policy-makers to ignore non-land assets in space and collapses colonization efforts
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
So far, this essay has pointed out the range of meanings attached to exploration, a term so conceptually broad that it would seem to admit anyone with a geographical goal and a good pair of shoes. But exploration has hidden assumptions that restrict its meaning. For example, the objectives of the VSE involve traveling to places distinguished by land and landforms (e.g. Moon-to-Mars, and perhaps to Near-Earth Objectse NEOs) rather than to points in space. In this focus on rocky places, NASA is following in a long tradition of exploration. Renaissance voyagers during the ‘‘Age of Discovery’’ viewed other lands e Asia, Africa, and the Spice Islands e as the goal of their voyages. Oceans, on the other hand, were treated as highways rather than habitats, a medium to traverse rather than to be investigated. Only in the 19th century did this change, as deep-sea exploration came of age. Yet even then many of these sea expeditions focused on the ocean floor rather than the watery world that covered it [24]. Twentieth century explorers have expressed this ‘‘land bias’’ too. When Frederick Cook and Robert Peary returned from their North Pole expeditions in 1909, their photos rep- resented the North Pole, a geographical point in the middle of the polar sea, as a towering hummock of ice. Yet neither man had navigational equipment precise enough to determine the location of the North Pole so exactly. Nevertheless, both men saw fit to plant their flag on the tallest, ‘‘rockiest’’ mound of ice in the vicinity (see Fig. 2). This penchant for visiting rocks in the name of ‘‘explora- tion’’ leaves many kinds of space science at a disadvantage. Certainly, for astronomy, it is well understood that free space is far more enabling for most telescopes than the lunar surface [25]. The EartheSun second Lagrange point, for example, is the operational location of choice for a host of new astronomy missions and mission concepts. This location, about four times the lunar distance anti-sunward from the Earth offers extraordinary thermal stability, with continuous power and line-of-sight communication. While it is often said that having humans on the lunar surface offers special opportunities for large science instruments there, it is rarely acknowledged that getting those humans onto the lunar surface is probably far more risky than getting them almost anywhere else in cis-lunar space. What if Lagrange points were culturally acceptable as prime targets for human exploration? These Lagrange points provide extraordinary opportunities for getting places, as very low-energy pathways connect them across the Solar System. Astrodynamicists Martin Lo and Shane Ross described what they termed the interplanetary superhighway system, with junctions marked by planetary Lagrange points [26]. Such locations are remarkably enabling for interplanetary access. Early in the 2000s the NASA Decadal Planning Team came up with a strategy in which a ‘‘Gateway’’ station would be deployed at the EartheMoon L1 point, 84% of the way from the Earth toward the Moon, that could link lunar surface activities (such as water and propellant mining) at low propulsion cost with a base on Mars [27,28]. The Gateway strategy for exploration was never adopted by ESAS. The historical precedent for that strategy is perhaps most closely polar exploration (where the site for conquest, if not discovery, was marked by dynamics rather than by mass). The idea of a mid-ocean location that offered national value by occupation or conquest was inconceivable to early explorers as well. While these Lagrange points may be a lynchpin to our future plans, our expeditionary heritage has usually ignored places such as these where there is nothing material to be found.
AT: inevitable
Exploration isn’t inherent in humans- other factors explain the desire for exploration
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
Let us take these ideas in order, starting with the human impulse to explore. We cannot deny that the history of our species is a history of motion. We are all the children of travelers: of long migrations out of Africa, oceanic crossings, and continental traverses. Archeological evidence suggests that humans spent most of their prehistory, from 120,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE, on the move. We bear the marks of these migrations in the foods we eat, the languages we speak, and the places we live. Indeed, we carry traces of our itinerant past inside of us, in our dietary preferences for foods salty and sweet, our peculiar anatomy and physiology, and our unique mitochondrial DNA, which, read carefully, offers us a road map of our ancestors’ paleolithic travels [8]. Yet these facts, so well established, tell us little about motives. Human curiosity has a long and storied history. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics by stating ‘‘All men possess by nature a craving for knowledge’’, an observation borne out in the earliest works of human literature, from Eve’s trans- gressions in Genesis to Odysseus’s trouble-making in the Odyssey. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that humans traveled primarily, or even incidentally, because of curiosity. During the long millennia of our prehistory, the most obvious reason for travel was survival, following seasonal animal migrations, escaping harsh weather, and avoiding predators and, perhaps, other humans [9]. Evidence points to exploration e in all its incarnations of meaning e as a cultural or political activity rather than a manifestation of instinct. History’s most celebrated voyagers e Pytheas, Zhang He, and Columbus e sailed from nations with imperial ambitions [10,11]. As Stephen Pyne points in his survey of the ages of exploration, ‘‘There is nothing predes- tined about geographical discovery, any more than there is about a Renaissance, a tradition of Gothic cathedrals, or the invention of the electric light bulb’’ [7]. The notion that exploration expressed deeper impulses, such as wanderlust or curiosity, came much later, during the 18th century Enlightenment, when voyages took up the systematic practice of science: gathering specimens and ethnographic data, observing celestial events, and testing geographical hypotheses. These expeditions expressed a genuine curiosity about the globe, yet they elicited state sponsorship only because rulers saw political value in discovery expeditions, a form of ‘‘soft power’’ statecraft that could enhance natio- nal prestige rather then add to colonies or imperial coffers [12,13].
AT: key to dominance
Framing spaceflight as dominance fails- Apollo proves that it can’t withstand geopolitical events
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
Yet the Apollo program has also shown the dangers in framing a national space exploration program too much in symbolic and geopolitical terms. As much as human space flight continues to have geopolitical value, it is a value that has varied considerably over time. Like the price of stocks, it remains subject to changes in world events.
**Aff
AT: “Exploration”
The word exploration is contextual– Default to the specific context of the Affirmative
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
The historical record offers a rich set of examples of what we call exploration: Christopher Columbus sailing to the New World, Roald Amundsen driving his dogs towards the South Pole, and Neil Armstrong stepping into the soft dust of the Moon. Yet these examples illustrate the difficulty in pinning down exploration as an activity. If we define exploration as travel through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it we exclude Columbus, whose discovery was serendipitous rather than purposeful. We would also have to exclude Amundsen and Armstrong, and indeed many of the pantheon of explorers, who tended to dash across new terrain rather than investigate it systematically. Even more expansive terms such as ‘‘discovery’’ sometimes offer a poor fit for the object of modern expeditions: did Robert Peary discover the North Pole in 1909, an axis point that Greek astronomers knew about 2500 years ago? Not in any meaningful sense of the word. Students of exploration, then, must make peace with this uncomfortable fact: ‘‘exploration’’ is a multivalent term, one which has been (and undoubtedly will continue to be) used in different ways by different people. Geographical discovery, scientific investigation, resource extraction, and high-risk travel are activities tucked inside this definitional basket.
CP links to politics more than the plan- Broad goals of exploration allow NASA to dodge political backlash
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
In truth, the ambiguity of the term ‘‘exploration’’ has certain advantages, particularly from the perspective of fund- ing and policy making. Because funding of NASA budgets requires broad agreement in Congress, the fuzziness of exploration often avoids triggering debates that would weaken political support. ‘‘In the political realm, it’s not desirable to have too precise a definition’’, according to Scott Hubbard, Stanford Professor of Engineering and Former Director of NASA Ames Research Center, with respect to exploration. Within this environment, explains Hubbard, defining explo- ration too narrowly ‘‘is not without some peril’’. Ian Pryke, Senior Fellow at George Mason University and Former Head of the European Space Agency’s Washington Office, speaks in similar terms about the word. ‘‘A little bit of constructive ambiguity never hurts.’’ [19].
Human exploration is key to the perception of space dominance
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
If human space flight has offered poor returns for science, it has paid off handsomely in symbolic and geopolitical terms. The maxim that ‘‘the country that can put a man on the Moon should be able to.’’ continues to resonate with the American public. Political stump speeches still reference the Apollo missions 40 years later. In addition to the national convention speeches mentioned earlier, President Obama’s acceptance speech in Grant Park looked back admiringly on the Apollo Program: ‘‘A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.’’ [29].
Focus on acquiring recourses from land in space leads policymakers to believe that colonization is our destiny
Lester and Robinson, 09 *Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin, AND **Assistant Professor of History at Hillyer College, University of Hartford (November 2009, Daniel F. and Michael, Space Policy, “Visions of exploration”,
Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 236-243, Science Direct SW)
The importance of going to places where there is ‘‘stuff’’ to find bears on the question thoughtfully articulated by John Marburger, Director of the Bush Office of Science and Tech- nology Policy, at the 2006 Goddard Symposium, about the extent to which we want to commit to incorporating the Solar System into our economic sphere. This would be such that resources from space, whether they be material resources mined from rocky bodies, or even energy from solar radiation, become commercially available to us. Historical antecedents relate broadly here, as exploration (whether human or robotic) becomes a search for harvestable material riches that can empower a nation. Identification of such tangible benefits becomes, in many respects, a test for human colonization, in which an ability to disconnect from the Earth and live off the land at some faraway site can be considered a fundamental human destiny.
1NC “Global”
“Global” Discourse constructs the world as one entity, eliminating difference and encouraging violent colonialism
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Despite the vision of world-order founded on a notion of a universal society of humankind aspiring toward a universal common good, (first given meaning within a conceptual political-legal framework through the birth of the so-called 'Westphalian" state system14), the materialities of "ordering" were of a different complexion altogether. Contrary to the disembodied rhetoric of world-order as bloodless evolution, the new images of the world and languages of "globality" did not evolve out of a sense of "hospitality"15 to the "other," the "stranger." Rather, the history of the creation of the post-
Westphalian "world" as one world, can be seen to be most intimately connected with the rise of an expansionist and colonizing world-view and practice. Voyages of "discovery" provided the necessary reconnaissance to image this "new world." Bit by bit, piece by piece, the jigsaw of the globe was completed. With the advance of the "discoverer," the "colonizer," the "invader," the "new" territories were given meaning within the hermeneutic construct that was the new "world." The significance of this evolution of the world does not, however, lie merely in its acquiring meaning. It is not simply the "idea" of the world that was brought to prominence through acts of colonization. The construction of the "stage" of the world has also occurred, albeit amid the performance of a violent drama upon it. The idea of a single world in need of order was followed by a succession of chained and brutalized bodies of the "other." The embodied world that has been in creation from the "colonial" times to the present could not, and does not, accommodate plurality. The very idea of "one world" contains the necessary impetus for the absorption, assimilation, if not destruction, of existing worlds and the genocide of existing socialities. This violence of "order-ing" within the historical epoch of colonialism is now plainly visible.
Construction the world as one using “global” discourse legitimizes colonial violence in the name of “World Order”
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
The discussion above was intended to provide a perspective of world-order as an historical process of ordering which, contrary to the benign symbolism of universalism evoked by notions such as "one world" and "global village," is constructed out of the violent destruction of diverse socialities. World-order, when re-viewed, therefore, may be understood as follows: * As a concept that seeks to articulate the civilizational project of humanity, it is at best nonsense, and at worst a fraudulent ideology of legitimization for the perpetuation of colonizing violence--"world-order" as symbolic violence. " As a material reality of violent social relations, it is a conscious and systematized design for the control of resources through the disciplining of minds and bodies--"world-order" as embodied violence.
2NC overview
The plan text participates in a form of violent linguistic ordering – the word “global” in their plan text is a command to think in a particular way
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Order as Coercive Command: The flip side of order as "structure" is order as "command." Viewed in this way, it is the present of the coercive process of "ordering" rather than the future of the emancipatory condition/structure of order that becomes emphasized. There is nothing "natural," "evolutionist" or "neutral" about world-order when the command of ordering is made visible. The vision of civilization as mechanical organization of the component parts of "humanity" is no longer tenable when the coercion of command to fit into this order is exposed. World-order, then, no longer describes the "order" of the world open to discovery, but rather, the "ordering" of the world open to conflict. Distinguishing these two meanings of "order" provides us with radically opposed directions of analysis and orientations for future imagings of social relations. Although the rhetoric of world-order would focus on visions of some projected "world" that provides the aspiration for collective endeavors, "order" does not come to be without necessary "ordering;" the "world" of "world-order" has not come to be without the necessary ordering of many worlds. The ordering and the ordered, the world of order and the ordered world, all are inextricable parts of the past and the present of "civil-ization."
2NC Framework
Their attempt to exclude our Q and make us speak in the “language” of policy, is part of an exclusionary framework that makes global change impossible
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
"We" too are subjects of this regulation. I speak here from my location within an institution of "teaching"/"learning." Nowhere is this order(ing) of truth more insidiously and impoverishingly done, than in the "worlds" of so- called "education." Here takes place the propagation of "truth-knowing;" here, knowledge that is "valuable" and "worthy" is expounded. But the body of knowledge that is regarded as valuable and worthy is increasingly becoming one that is homogenized, standardized, and "monoculturized." Despite having been exposed as a colonizing and alienating force, the "banking" model of education thrives on.44 The "rear' knowledge of the "world," through the "learning" of the life sciences, social sciences, business administration, and information technology, is everywhere disseminated using the same sign- posts, reference-points and "texts" of wisdom if it is to be "recognized" as valuable and worthy.45 Thus, "students" from around the "world" come together to share in these discourses, minor inconveniences of vocabularic differences and accents aside, they share a language and, therefore, a "worldview." Questions of what is "real," what is "possible," what are the "problems" and what may be the "solutions" are, therefore, contemplated and imagined within managed parameters. "Creativity" is confined within the boundaries of a validated discourse, if not paradigm.46 This is the knowledge domain of "practitioners." This is not to say that knowledges of the "other"- of cultures, languages, social systems, beliefs, rituals, "traditional" economies-are excluded. They too have their hallowed place; they are the "studies" of antiquity and the exotic. They are studied for the sake of "knowledge" rather than wisdom, information rather than action. Their
students are "scholars," not "practitioners." Thus, the past, the present, the future, to be human, and to exist in "society" are all given "ordered" meaning. Thus, the world-order(ing) of truth is the impoverishment of the diversity of wisdom through the particularization of knowledge. With this "truth,"- we then set about viewing the world, setting it right. These "truths" of a (mis)ordered (in)humanity, therefore, become repeated, and although critiqued, are maintained in their integrity as constituting a self-contained universe of and for imagination.
Focus on the role of a policy maker and solving global problems ignores our role, allowing us to abdicate responsibility for the violence we occur in- we are responsible for the violence of the state
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
My questioning is not of intent, or of commitment, or of the sincerity of those who advocate world-order transformations. Rather, my questionings relate to a perspective on "implications." Here, there is a very different, and more subtle, sort of globalized world-order that we need to consider-the globalization of violence, wherein human relationships become disconnected from the personal and are instead conjoined into distant and distanced chains of violence, an alienation of human and human. And by the nature of this new world-ordering, as the web of implication in relational violence is increasingly extended, so too, the vision of violence itself becomes blurred and the voice, muted. Through this implication into violence, therefore, the order(ing) of emancipatory imagination is reinforced. What we cannot see, after all, we cannot speak; what we refuse to see, we dare not speak. So, back to the question: to what extent, for this, "our world," do we contemplate change when "we" imagine transformed "world-orders?" In addition to the familiar culprits of violent orderings, such as government, financial institutions, transnational corporations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO (as significant culprits they indeed are), do we, in our contemplations of violent orders, vision our locations within corporate "educational" institutions as "professional academics" and "researchers," our locations within corporate NGOs as "professional activists," our locations within "think-tanks" and "research organizations" as "professional policy- formulators," and whatever other locations of elite "expertise" we have been "trained" to possess, as ordered sites, complicit and parasitic, within a violent "world-order"? Do we see in our critiques of world-orderings, out there, the orderings we find, right here, in our bodies, minds, relationships, expectations, fears and hopes? Would we be willing to see "our (ordered) world" dismantled in order that other worlds, wherein our "privileges" become extinguished, may flourish? These concerns are, then, I believe, the real complexities of judgment and action. Consideration should be given, not only to those of the political-structural, so often honed in on, but also to the issue of the political-personal, which ultimately is the "unit" of "worlds" and of "orders." If "globalization," as a recent obsession of intellectual minds, has contributed anything to an understanding of the ways of the "world," I suggest, it is that we cannot escape "our" implication within the violence of "world (mis)orders." IV. A WORLD FOR TRANSFORMATION: TWO POEMS Despite the fixation of the beneficiaries of ordered worlds, even the ordered "critic," with the prescribed languages, visions and possibilities of human socialities, other realities of humanity nevertheless persist. Notwithstanding the globalization of social concern and the transnationalization of professionalized critique and reformatory action, struggles against violence remain energized, persistent and located. They are waged through the bodies of lives lived in experiential locations against real instruments of terror, functioning within embodied sites of violence. Non-information and non-representation of the existence of such struggles, and non-learning of the wisdoms thus generated do not negate their truths or the vibrancy of their sociahties.5' "We" are participants in ordered worlds, not merely observers. The choice
is whether we wish to recognize our own locations of ordered violence and participate in the struggle to resist their orderings, or whether we wish merely to observe violence in far-off worlds in order that our interventionary participation "out there" never destabilizes the ground upon which we stand. I suggest that we betray the spirit of transformatory struggle, despite all our expressions of support and even actions of professionalized expertise, if our own locations, within which are ordered and from which we ourselves order, remain unscrutinized.
AT: Perm
Trying to bring change within the language and structures of current ordering just makes the system stronger and risks co-option
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
The mutuality of "professional" sensibilities between the "criticized" and the "critic" brings with it a considerable degree of closure. Primary among the consequences of this familiarity and, therefore, similarity between the "professional" location of both, is that emancipatory imagination is contained within the same aspirational "languages" that are commonly understood. Through this closure of language and, therefore, imagination, emancipation itself becomes absorbed into an enclosed conceptual space for articulation. The standpoint of the same rhetorical devices of civilizational projections become the tools for entitlement claims. Put differently, what we might see as direction for emancipation is itself "ordered" by our own conceptual frameworks that we derive from ourselves as subjects and objects of ordering. Thus, just as the aspirations of most anti-colonial elite leaderships were infused with the colonizer's visions of human progress-the languages of "statehood," of "modernization," of "institution building, and the like-so too now the languages of the elites of "civil society" reflect the terrain as demarcated by contemporary world-orderists. Development, democracy, human rights, NGO "networks," even "education" and "law," are all contemporary slogans that are repeated in the hope of a progressive civilizational movement toward human emancipation. And increasingly, these "transnational," even "global," languages of human emancipation are formulated and articulated within professional sites of resistance and activism that stand as mirrors of ordering institutions; for the government committee there are the NGO forums, for the ministerial conference there is the "alternative" conference of civil society delegates, for the business/corporate coalition with government there are the similar NGO partnerships. The play of critique and legitimization, of compromise and co-operation, of review and reformulation, is thereby enabled, taking on a momentum and a rationale of its own, becoming an activity of grand proportions where the activity itself becomes a reason for, and object of perpetuation. To be outside of these circles of "communication" is deemed to be without "voice," which is for the critic, an unacceptable silencing. To be inside these circles, however, entails a constant torment of co-option, betrayal and appropriation of voice. The power of world-ordering to self-sustain, I suggest, lies precisely in this, its ability to orde]r the "voices" and the "voicing" of dissent. From this perspective, the fact of dissent or critique is not, in itself, the significant indicator of resistance that we might consider it to be. The point, I argue, is not that dissent is registered, but rather, how, where and in what form that dissent is expressed. Voices of dissent that are absorbed into the channels of voicing as provided by the structures of order, in my view, have themselves been ordered. Rather than providing energies for imagination, they are drained of them, sustaining instead the orders against which they purport to stand. In the struggle to find a voice we, therefore, comply with the orders of voicing; the best of times being when our voice is "heard," tolerated, sometimes even congratulated and rewarded, the worst of times being when it is appropriated and transformed into further legitimizations of violence, and most commonly, when it is simply ignored. To sustain "us," therefore, self-referential communities of voice are founded, established and propagated, quoting back and forth the same voices, repetition being equated with significance and impact. While we keep busy being heard, "achieving" lots by way of giving volume to (our) voice, little is changed in the order-ing of worlds. How much of the continuing violence within the misorderings of the world has followed from this experience?
AT: Doesn’t Apply Today
Coercion and Colonialism are legitimized today with “global” discourse
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Contemporary world-orderings, consistent with those of the past, are implemented using a range of civilizational legitimization. With the advent of an ideology of "humanity," a "post-colonial" concession to human dignity demanded by the previously colonized, new languages of the civilizational project had to be conceived of and projected. "Freed" from the brutalities of the order of historical colonialism, the "ordered" now are subjected to the colonizing force of the "post-colonial," and increasingly, globalization-inspired ideologies of development and security. Visible, still, is the legitimization of "order" as coercive command through the rhetoric of "order" as evolutionary structure.
The rhetoric of new beginnings is used to justify ordering
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
The promise of "new beginnings" has been a constant feature in the rhetoric of post-colonial world-orders, for, after all, new beginnings have a certain captivating allure. "Liberation" from the old has found utterance in a myriad of slogans-independence, peace, security, nation-building, democracy, development, prosperity-made during Party Annual General Meetings, with launches of National Development Plans, or at the lavish settings of the United Nations and international Conferences. With the passing of the blemished age of colonialism, the powerful-national governments, the UN, the World Bank and IMF, and even those countries who individually and severally brutalized and pillaged the formerly "uncivilized"--are now willing, it would seem, to get into the act of creating the "new age" of welfare for all. New beginnings, and more new beginnings, the (once) new United Nations,18 the (now dead) New International Economic Order, the (still-born) new "sustainable development," the (old) New World- Order, each grand promise of tomorrow ushered in, tired and haggard, but accompanied with much frenzied trumpeting.
“Forgetting” parts of the past justifies continued colonization because we can ignore past failures
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
All this expression of angst and hope is, of course, nothing new. Like a social ritual played out with consistent regularity, we have become familiar with these gatherings of "developmentalists," at which they administer healthy measures of both admonishments for past failures and encouragements for future hope. And like in all rituals, processes of "remembering," which are the public face of proceedings, are accompanied by the equally important processes of "forgetting." Repeated and remembered are the "failures," the commitments to "humanity," the conditions of suffering that are deemed "intolerable," and the articulations of hope in future "action." Ignored and forgotten are the violence of the failures, the fraudulence of the commitments, the processes of inflicted suffering deemed necessary, and the articulations of despair about past actions. Still, the ritual performs a regenerative purpose. It recasts anew the project of development with all its civilizational importance and reassures its practitioners of their historic mission to "order" society.
***AFF
Changing words can’t solve- Violence functions in more pervasive ways and a fundamental rethinking of decision-making is necessary to overcome violence
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Rightly, we are concerned with the question of what can be done to alleviate the sufferings that prevail. But there are necessary prerequisites to answering the "what do we do?" question. We must first ask the intimately connected questions of "about what?" and "toward what end?" These questions, obviously, impinge on our vision and judgment. When we attempt to imagine transformations toward preferred human futures, we engage in the difficult task of judging the present. This is difficult not because we are oblivious to violence or that we are numb to the resulting suffering, but because, outrage with "events" of violence aside, processes of violence embroil and implicate our familiarities in ways that defy the simplicities of straightforward imputability. Despite our best efforts at categorizing violence into convenient compartments-into "disciplines" of study and analysis such as "development" and "security" (health, environment, population, being other examples of such compartmentalization)-the encroachments of order(ing) function at more pervasive levels. And without doubt, the perspectives of the observer, commentator, and actor become crucial determinants. It is necessary, I believe, to question this, "our," perspective, to reflect upon a perspective of violence which not only locates violence as a happening "out there" while we stand as detached observers and critics, but is also one in which we are ourselves implicated in the violence of ordered worlds where we stand very much as participants. For this purpose of a critique of critique, it is necessary to consider the "technologies" of ordering.
Global imagination is necessary and good- a combination of the status quo and the alternative works best
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
My reason for this is simple. The projections of "good ideas" for the reconstitution of "global" imaginings within the mainstream of political-legal discourse are many. No doubt such endeavors will continue in search of better
futures. Reference to these articulations and attention to their proposals are indeed necessary as we seek to destabilize current hegemonies of violence. However, a representation of these proposals is not, I believe, what I could usefully do here. Instead, I would like to pursue an alternative track of "imaging" human futures, "re-viewing" rather than "reframing" world-order.
1NC “Resources”
The affirmative’s usage of the word “resource” reentrenches us within traditional homocentric imperialist ideology
Foreman, 07 (4/1/07, Dave, the Rewilding Institute, “The Arrogance of Resourcism”, )
I’ve stirred up the anthill by warning that worldviews and policies of resourcism and enviro-resourcism are undermining and weakening certain conservation organizations and the whole conservation community. In this edition of “Around the Campfire,” I look at the bedrock of the conservation mind—that when we really dig down deep, Nature conservationists believe that wild species and places should be protected for their own sakes. First, however, we need to understand the mind of resourcism, which has been remarkably consistent for the one hundred years since Gifford Pinchot set up the United States Forest Service and on into today’s era of “sustainable development” and “working forests.” I think you will be impressed by how up-to-date some of the early resourcist writing sounds. Gifford Pinchot’s “conservation” or resource conservation was more accurately renamed resourcism by human ecologist Paul Shepard in 1967 in his first book Man in the Landscape. One of my campaigns is to get resourcism widely adopted by conservationists as a replacement for resource conservation. Resourcism is consciously and enthusiastically part of humanism. Humanism is the secular religion of the modern (and postmodern) world. In his no-false-gods book, The Arrogance Of Humanism, ecologist David Ehrenfeld defines humanism as “a supreme faith in human reason—its ability to confront and solve the many problems that humans face.” Similarly, philosopher Max Oelschlaeger writes that modernism is the hope “to transform a base and worthless wilderness into industrialized, democratic civilization” and that it “underlies the emergence of a profound homocentrism…which may be characterized as the ideology of man infinite or the rise of Lord Man.” Humanism makes Man the measure of all things, the vessel of all values. Humanism is engineering—of machines, society, individuals, and Nature. Resourcism is Humanism applied to Nature (or “natural resources,” in the jargon of resourcism). Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890-1920, by historian Samuel P. Hays, is the best source for understanding the origins and ideology of what he calls the Progressive Conservation Movement and what I call Resourcism. Hays writes: “Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts.” Hays shows how these resource scientists in Theodore Roosevelt’s administration believed that emerging science and technology were opening up “unlimited opportunities for human achievement” and thus they were filled “with intense optimism.” While they worried some about possible resource shortages in the future, “They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations.” These professional men who claimed the mantle of conservation did not believe in the preservation of the land. “In fact, they bitterly opposed those who sought to withdraw resources from commercial development.” So much, then, for a single conservation movement fighting nineteenth-century landscalping, so much for a sense of humility before the workings of Nature, so much for allowing some land to hav e its own will. From 1900 on there has been a chasm between resourcism and conservation. What these two movements have really shared is opposition to landscalping and support for public lands. A professional, scientific managerial elite was deeply rooted in the resourcism movement. Hays says that this elite believed, “Since resource matters were basically technical in nature…technicians, rather than legislators should deal with them.” And, “Conflicts between competing resource users…should not be dealt with” by the political process, but rather by professional resource managers coolly making “rational and scientific decisions.” They had a vision of a school of resource management “guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by technicians.” The resource managers’ emphasis was oriented toward a reductionist, engineering version of science—how to manipulate Nature. In his illuminating book on the history of natural science, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Donald Worster sees “two ways of reasoning, two moral allegiances.” One is “Arcadian” science, which tries to understand the world around us; the other is “imperialist” science, which is the “drive for the domination of nature.” Resourcism was and is solidly in the imperialist tradition.
The term “resource” engages in a homogenizing system used to deny the existence of value of all beings external to economic evaluation- viewing the world as a “standing reserve” only existent for the purpose of exploitation
Paehlke, 95 (Robert C., Professor and Chair, Environmental and Resource Studies Program, Trent University, Canada, “Conservation and environmentalism: an encyclopedia”, )
Resourcism is a term of relatively recent origin used to depict that manner of viewing the world which reduces virtually everything to two entities: people and resources. Since by "resources” we generally mean anything which can be bent to human use or consumption, then virtually anything is potentially a resource. All that is required to achieve that designation is the discovery of a use (as when we speak of the Amazon rainforest as a resource from which science may someday extract important medical benefits). Bur while it is commonplace to speak of resources (and nowadays even of "˜human resources"), the striking feature of ill is its tacit expectation that we exist solely in a domain of resources, whether of present use or potential use. In Heidegger’s earlier terminology is the view of the world as a “reserve" awaiting exploitation by human societies. To its critics the disturbing feature of resourcism is the single, homogenizing system of value that it brings to its worldview. The flattening of the world to the single category of resource conceals or denies the diversity of existence and the plethora of value which humans, and other organisms, have typically encountered in their experience of the world. Resourcism constitutes a kind of lowest common denominator' of material existence and makes it difficult or impossible to speak of a heterogeneity of values or to deal in anything except economic evaluation. Hence, the ubiquity of resourcist assumptions has a tendency to constrain debate to terms consistent with those assumptions, and to inhibit nonconformist considerations. Moreover, in reducing the categories of existence to two-humans and resources-resourcist assumptions reinforce the idea that all nonhuman beings are definable in terms of their utility to human societies. Such anthropocentric assumptions inevitably impede the possibility of altering the human-nonhuman interaction and reinforce the drive to global management, control, and exploitation.
Representations and discursive framings of the environment are the only way to base actual environmental policy – without our framework you have no means to evaluate the affirmative.
Luke, [Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Spring 2003, Aurora Online, , liam]
So the book of nature then remains for the most part a readerly text. Different human beings will observe its patterns differently; they will choose to accentuate some while deciding to ignore others. Consequently, nature's meanings always will be multiple and fixed in the process of articulating eco-managerialist discourses. In the United States, the initial professionalized efforts to resourcify nature began with the second industrial revolution, and the original conservation movements that emerged over a century ago, as progressively minded managers founded schools of agriculture, schools of engineering, schools of forestry, schools of management, and schools of mining, to master nature and transform its materiality into goods and services. By their lights, the entire planet was reduced through resourcifying assumptions into a complex system of inter-related natural resource systems, whose ecological processes in turn are left for certain human beings to operate efficiently or inefficiently as the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure. Directed towards generating greater profit and power from the rational insertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production, the discourses of resource management work continuously to redefine the earth's physical and social ecologies, as sites where environmental professionals can operate in many different open-ended projects of eco-system management. The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to environmental policy, however, are rarely rendered articulate by the existing scientific and technological discourses that train experts to be experts. Still, a logic of resourcification is woven into the technocratic lessons that people must acquire in acquiring their expert credentials. In particular, there are perhaps six practices that orient how work goes here. Because I have a weakness for alliteration, I call them Resource Managerialism, Rehabilitation Managerialism, Restoration Managerialism, Renewables Managerialism, Risk Managerialism, and Recreationist Managerialism.
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Resource rhetoric justifies the portrayal of nature as a standing reserve- this debate should serve as a staging ground for the underlying debate for alternative narratives
Evernden, 96 (Neil, Author of “The Alien” and the “Social Construction of Nature”, “Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis”, )
Our collective inability to take effective action on climate heating confirms a lack of solidarity on how significant scientific information is. The status quo in short, is normative and overwhelms the voice of dissent-the minority opinion that the buildup of atrnospheric CO2 is morally reprehensible, a threat to life on earth. And so on through most permutations of the environmental crisis. It is not scientific information that has been lacking so much as the will to fashion this information into a democratically determined environmental agenda. Not having any collective sense of our preferences, environmental policy has been determined by default, by the socially dominant language of utilitarian individualism. ln this scenario nature is no more than a standing reserve to fuel the good life-the unlimited production and consumption of material goods. Voices of dissent, even when supported by an avalanche of scientific data have been pushed to the periphery of the social decision-making process. In fact, as Neil Evemden points out, the measure or "instance of physical pollution serves only as the means of persuasion, a staging ground for the underlying debate” for alternative narratives (l992b. S). Environmental science (in any of its many iterations) is plastic. "An institutional shaman that can be induced to pronounce natural whatever we wish to espouse" (l992b. 15). Scientific judgment is often tailored to fit the modem narrative, becoming primarily an instrument for the control of nature. Alternatively stated, scientific judgment is framed by the progressive conservation movement: resourcism. For insiders, who accept the modem story as unconditional. the goal of environmental science is to manage planet Earth (for example, see Clark 1989). Such experts acclaim the progress that has been made in controlling pollution, thereby advancing the good life. Science helps to confirm in effect that our future is secure. For example, air quality standards now exist where none were in place. Measurement confirms progress. Continued progress (which presumably confirms that the modem paradigm is not morally flawed) depends on passing new laws as needed and on the development of ecotechnologies that either lessen or forestall the buildup of pollutants. In sum, I am arguing that both religious and scientific discourse are necessary conditions for the resolution of ecocrisis. Religious discourse offers legitimating narratives that remain outside the framework of utilitarian individualism and might also lead to normative judgments of the pure and impure, which in turn would lead toward sustainability Positivism, there is no intrinsic conflict between science and religion below the level of cosmological model. From a sociolinguistic perspective the question about scientific and religious discourse is one of collaboration. Can science and religion collaborate to fashion a viable and adaptive cultural narrative? From a sociolinguistic perspective the answer is yes. From my position-inside language-meta physical distinctions between science and religion or between facts (lumps) and values (text) are not useful. Vernacular models--religious discourse-are required to contextualize scientific discourse in ways that lead toward sustainability Recognition of the influence of cultural context on science might resolve the paradox of environmentalism. At present the modern narrative of utilitarian individualism rule our collective lives. Nature is no more than a standing reserve awaiting human appropriation.
The discursive reality created by “resources” reduces everything to a realm of calculative exploitation
Luke, 95 (Timothy W., Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University “On Environmentality: Geo Power and Econ Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism”, JStor)
The separation of organisms from their environments is the primary epistemological divide cutting through reality in the rhetoric of ecology. This discursive turn goes back to Haeckel's initial 1866 identification of ecology as the science that investigates all of the relations of an organism to its organic and inorganic environments. Nonetheless, there are differences among ecologists over what these "environments" might be. Because the expanse of the organic and inorganic environment is so broad, it often is defined in terms delimiting what it is by looking at what it is not. In other words, it is the organism, or biotic community, or local ecosystem that ecologists place at the center of their systems of study, while the environment is reduced to everything outside of the subject of analysis. With these maneuvers, environments are often transformed rhetorically into silences, backgrounds, or settings. In this manner, they also are studied and understood not directly as such, but more indirectly in terms of the objective relations and effects they register upon the subjects of study they surround. Even so, this inversion of one thing, like an organism or society, into everything, or the environment, might disclose the nature of the environment only in relation to this one thing. After all, environmental analysis must reduce "everything" to measures of "anything" available for measurement (like temperature levels, gas concentrations, molecular dispersions, resource variations, or growth rates) to track variations in "something" (like an organ- ism's, a biome's, or a river's responses to these factors). But is it "the environment" that is being understood here, or is its identity being evaded in reducing it to a subset of practicable measurements? Does this vision of "environment" really capture the actual quality or true quantity of all human beings' interrelations with all of the terrains, waters, climates, soils, architectures, technologies, societies, economies, cultures, or states surrounding them? In its most expansive applications, then, the environment becomes a strong but sloppy force: it is anything out there, everything around us, something affecting us, nothing within us, but also a thing upon which we act. Despite its formal definitions, however, the environment is not, in fact, everything. Many environmental discourses look instead at particular sites or at peculiar forces. The discursive variations and conceptual confrontations of the "environment" really begin to explode when different voices accentuate this or that set of things in forming their environmental analysis. On the one side, they may privilege forces in the ecosphere, or, on the other side, they might stress concerns from the technosphere. But in either case, each rhetoric which operates as an agency protecting "the environment" struggles to site "the environmental" as a somewhere affected by or coming from everything. Perhaps the early origins of "the environment" as a concept- its historical emergence and original applications-might prove more helpful. In its original sense, which is borrowed by English from Old French, an environment is an action resulting from, or the state of being produced by a verb: "to environ." And environing as a verb is, in fact, a type of strategic action. To environ is to encircle, encompass, envelop, or enclose. It is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something. Its uses even suggest stationing guards around, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over some person or place. To environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer, or besiege that place or person. An environment, as either the means of such activity or the product of these actions, now might be read in a more suggestive manner. It is the encirclement, circumscription, or beleaguerment of places and persons in a strategic disciplinary policing of space. An environmental act, in turn, is already a disciplining move, aimed at constructing some expanse of space-a locale, a biome, a planet as biospherical space, or, on the other hand, some city, any region, the global economy in technospherical territory in a discursive envelope. Within these enclosures, environmental expertise can arm environmentalists who stand watch over these surroundings, guarding the rings that include or exclude forces, agents, and ideas. On Environmentality 65 If one thinks about it, this original use of "the environment" is an accurate account of what is, in fact, happening in many environmental practices today. Environmentalized places become sites of supervision, where environmentalists see from above and from without through the enveloping designs of administratively delimited systems. Encircled by enclosures of alarm, environments can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in these interpretive frames, environments can be redirected to fulfill the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives, and administrative writs. Environing, then, engenders "environmentality," which embeds instrumental rationalities in the policing of ecological spaces. 3. Environmentality and Governmentality. These reflections on "the environment" reframe its meanings in terms of the practices of power, allowing us to turn to Michel Foucault for additional insight. The bio-power formation de- scribed by Foucault was not historically closely focused upon the role of Nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 138-42). For Foucault, the whole point of the controlled tactics of inserting human bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism was to bring "life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations," making the disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into many agencies as part of the "transformation of human life" (143). Once this threshold of biopower was crossed, human economics, politics, and technologies continually placed all human beings' existence into question. Foucault notes that these industrial transformations implicitly raised ecological issues as they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme of defining human interactions with Nature. Living became "environmentalized," as humans related to their history and biological life in new ways from within growing artificial cities and mechanical modes of production, which positioned this new form of human being "at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside 66 Timothy W Luke human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power" (143). Here we can begin to locate the emergence of "the environment" as a nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics. As human beings began to consciously wager their life as a species on the outcomes of these biopolitical strategies and technological systems, it became clear that they also were wagering the lives of other (or all) species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as one of many lacunae in his analysis, it is clear there is much more going on here than he realizes. Once human power/knowledge formations become the foundation of industrial society's economic development, they also become the basis for the physical survival of all terrestrial life forms. Here, eco- logical analysis emerges as a productive power formation that rein- vests human bodies-their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence- with bio-historical significance by framing them within their various bio-physical environments filled with various animal and plant bodies.
The word “resource” reduces nature to a cybernetic system available to human dismantlement and managerialism
Luke, 95 (Timothy W., Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University “On Environmentality: Geo Power and Econ Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism”, JStor)
The script of environmentality embedded in new notions like "the environment" is rarely made articulate in scientific and technical discourses. Yet, there are politics in these scripts. The advocates of deep ecology and social ecology dimly perceive this in their frustrations with "reform environmentalism," which weaves its logics of geo-power in and out of the resource managerialism that has defined the mainstream of contemporary environmental protection thinking and traditional natural resource conservationism (Luke, "Green Consumerism"). Resource managerialism can be read as the eco-knowledge of modern Governmentality. While voices in favor of conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stance comes in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s and the closing of the Western Frontier in the 1890s (Noble). Whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power to deplete natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conservation, is well established by the early 1900s (Nash, Wilderness). President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, organized the Governor's Conference in 1907 to address this concern, inviting the participants to recognize that the natural endowments upon which "the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already exhausted" (Jarrett 51). Over the past nine decades, the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not changed significantly. In fact, this code of eco-knowledge has only become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations. Paralleling the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts on the shop floor and professional man- agers in the main office, resource managerialism imposes corporate administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use in the face of excessive demand) on the supply side as well as overconsumption (excessive resource exploitation with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficient resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature must be reduced-through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global economies-to a cybernetic system of biophysical systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce "resources" efficiently and in adequate amounts when and where needed in the modern market- place. In turn, Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the ecoknowledges of resource managerialism as the source of "goods" for sizable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial "bads" also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically monopolize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites. Many of these eco- knowledge assumptions and geo-power commitments can be seen at work in the discourses of the Worldwatch Institute as it develops its own unique vision of environmentality for a global resource managerialism
Resource rhetoric depicts the human relation to nature as solely conumeristic
Doremus, 2000 (Holly ,Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, Washington & Lee Law Review, Winter 2000, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a New Discourse.”, liam)
If it is to address the problem of defining and developing a viable and fulfilling human relationship with nature. the rhetoric of nature protection must include people in the picture. It cannot simply rely on the wilderness vision of nature necessarily isolated from humanity, unable to bear even the lightest human touch Putting people in the picture means acknowledging people as a part of part of nature and emphasizing human connections to nature The rhetoric of sustainable development tries to put people in the picture. But the people it depicts use nature only as a material resource; they do not have emotional connections to it. The picture is one dimensional; as a result, it would likely sanction the loss of much more nature than environmentalists would be willing to give up n303 In order to build support for preserving more, environmentalists must concentrate their rhetoric on emotional or spiritual, rather than material, connections with nature. One lesson we can draw from the success of the esthetic arguments for wilderness protection IS that people do care about the ways in which nature can affect human character Wilderness has been presented partly as a way to maintain the desirable aspects of the frontier character in an era which would not otherwise produce them 11304 The second-generation discourse should take the idea that nature shapes human character beyond the wilderness context Creating rugged, self-reliant individualists capable of surviving on the frontier cannot be the focus of nature protection efforts in the tamer places closer to home, but some other parts of the wildenerness idea can. Contact with nature in our daily lives can help imbue the sense of humility and of being part of a larger world to which wilderness advocates referred n305 Furthermore, contact with a local natural community can help build a larger sense of community with the people with whom we share nature. Large numbers of Americans say they are anxious to develop those sorts of connections to community and place.
The affirmatives rhetoric reduces nature to a calculative reserve- only by questioning these assumptions can we attain an ecological stand
Luke, 95 (Timothy W., Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University “On Environmentality: Geo Power and Econ Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism”, JStor)
The Worldwatch Institute provides a curious instantiation of how regimes of environmentality might be seen at work in the processes of developing a geo-power/eco-knowledge formation. Taking the world as one ecological site, the Worldwatch Institute aptly typifies a green power/knowledge center in the play of current-day environmental politics. Seeing the path of untrammeled industrial development as the cause of environmental crises, a recent Worldwatch Institute book by Brown, Flavin, and Postel attributes the prevailing popular faith in material growth to "a narrow economic view of the world" (21). Any sense of constraint on further growth is cast by economics "in terms of inadequate demand growth rather than limits imposed by the earth's resources" (22). Ecologists, however, study the allegedly complex changing relationships of organisms with their environments, and, for them, "growth is confined by the parameters of the biosphere" (22). For Brown, Flavin, and Postel, economists ironically regard ecologists' concerns as "a minor subdiscipline of economics-to be 'internalized' in economic models and dealt with at the margins of economic planning," while "to an ecologist, the economy is a narrow subset of the global ecosystem" (23). To end this schism, the Worldwatch Institute pushes for melding ecology with economics to infuse environmental studies with economic instrumental ratio- 72 Timothy W Luke nality and defuse economics with ecological systems reasoning. Once this is done, the roots of economic growth no longer can be divorced from "the natural systems and resources from which they ultimately derive," and any economic process that "undermines the global ecosystem cannot continue indefinitely" (23). With this rhetorical maneuver, the Worldwatch Institute articulates its vision of geo-power/eco-knowledge as the instrumental rationality of resource managerialism working on a global scale. Nature, now reinterpreted as a cybernetic system of biophysical systems, reappears among nation-states in those "four biological systems-forests, grasslands, fisheries, and croplands-which sup- ply all of our food and much of the raw materials for industry, with the notable exceptions of fossil fuels and minerals" (Brown, Flavin, and Postel 73). As a result, the performance of these systems might be monitored in analytical spreadsheets written in bioeconomic terms, and then judged in equations balancing increased human population and highly constrained base ecosystem outputs. When looking at these four systems, one must recognize Such requirements arise from the convergence of dangerous trends identified by such bioeconomic accounting: 40 percent of the earth's annual net primary production on land now goes directly to meet human needs or is indirectly used or destroyed by human activity-leaving 60 percent for the millions of other land-based species with which humans share the planet. While it took all of human history to reach this point, the share could double to 80 percent by 2030 if current rates of population growth continue; rising per capita consumption could shorten the doubling time considerably. Along the way, with people usurping an ever larger share of the earth's life-sustaining energy, natural systems will unravel faster. (74) To avoid this collapse, human beings must stop increasing their numbers so rapidly, halt increasingly resource-intensive modes of production, and limit increasing levels of material consumption. All of these ends require a measure of surveillance and degree of steering beyond the modern nation-state, but perhaps not beyond some postmodern Worldwatch engaged in the disciplinary tasks of equilibrating the "net primary production" of solar energy fixed by photosynthesis in the four systems. Natural resources in the total solar economy of food stocks, fisheries, forest preserves, and grass lands are rhetorically ripped from Nature only to be returned as environmental resources, enveloped in accounting procedures and encircled by managerial programs. Worldwatching presumes to know all of this, and in knowing it, to have mastered all of its economic/ecological implications through authoritative technical analysis. By questioning the old truth regime of mere economic growth, a new regime of truth for attaining sophisticated ecological economy stands ready to reintegrate human production and consumption in the four biological systems.
Resource rhetoric depicts the human relation to nature as solely conumeristic
Doremus, 2000 (Holly ,Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, Washington & Lee Law Review, Winter 2000, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a New Discourse.”, liam)
If it is to address the problem of defining and developing a viable and fulfilling human relationship with nature. the rhetoric of nature protection must include people in the picture. It cannot simply rely on the wilderness vision of nature necessarily isolated from humanity, unable to bear even the lightest human touch Putting people in the picture means acknowledging people as a part of part of nature and emphasizing human connections to nature The rhetoric of sustainable development tries to put people in the picture. But the people it depicts use nature only as a material resource; they do not have emotional connections to it. The picture is one dimensional; as a result, it would likely sanction the loss of much more nature than environmentalists would be willing to give up n303 In order to build support for preserving more, environmentalists must concentrate their rhetoric on emotional or spiritual, rather than material, connections with nature. One lesson we can draw from the success of the esthetic arguments for wilderness protection IS that people do care about the ways in which nature can affect human character Wilderness has been presented partly as a way to maintain the desirable aspects of the frontier character in an era which would not otherwise produce them 11304 The second-generation discourse should take the idea that nature shapes human character beyond the wilderness context Creating rugged, self-reliant individualists capable of surviving on the frontier cannot be the focus of nature protection efforts in the tamer places closer to home, but some other parts of the wildenerness idea can. Contact with nature in our daily lives can help imbue the sense of humility and of being part of a larger world to which wilderness advocates referred n305 Furthermore, contact with a local natural community can help build a larger sense of community with the people with whom we share nature. Large numbers of Americans say they are anxious to develop those sorts of connections to community and place.
Impact – Extinction
Human exploitation of nature reinforces the structural violence of the status quo causing extinction
Zimmerman, University of Colorado, Boulder Professor of Philosophy, 2002
(Michael, “Encountering Alien Otherness” in The Concept of the Foreign, ed. Rebecca Saunders accessed: 7-06-11, pg4-5 , liam)
Recently, concern about foreign immigrants has grown in Western countries to which people from poorer countries (including former colonies) are flocking to escape political oppression and to find work. For many tourists, encountering otherness-- distinctive clothing, different skin color, odd cultural practices, unusual cuisines--is the whole point of traveling. Having those exotic others immigrating to one's own country is another matter altogether, however. Politicians frequently try to gain political power by turning foreigners--and even citizens who can be portrayed as sufficiently other--into scapegoats for the country's woes. In the U.S., for example, immigrant-bashers play on the fears that some people have about losing their jobs to immigrants, even though job loss is more often due to decisions taken by powerful transnational economic interests. Even people not immediately threatened by outsiders will often join in disparaging or expelling them. People tend to project mortality and evil onto outsiders, aliens, others. By dominating or even destroying the death- and evil-bearing other, the dominant group feels as if it has conquered death and evil.10 Due to surging human populations, rapid shifts in capital investment and economic structures, environmental degradation, and greater ease of travel, mass migrations will only increase. Given the destructive capacity of current weapons, humanity may either have come to terms with otherness, or else risk destroying itself. Just as people have used differences in skin color, religion, gender, cultural practices, language, ideology, and economics to justify violence against other humans, people have also used differences between humans and other life forms to justify needless violence against plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. For centuries, people have claimed that one trait or another--from tool using to linguistic ability--demonstrates human superiority over other life. The nineteenth century doctrine of Manifest Destiny proclaimed that a united American people (white, of European descent) was bound to "develop" the continent's natural resources from coast to coast. Modernity’s ideology of anthropocentric humanism, which “others” nature by depicting it solely as an instrument for human ends, generates enormous ecological problems. In recent decades, the “dark side” of modernity has come in for deserved criticism. Despite its undeniable problems, however, modernity has also made possible great improvements in political freedom, material well-being, scientific knowledge, and human lifespan.
Impact – Turns Environment
An anthropocentric view of the world causes environmental destruction
Sivil, lecturer in Environmental Philosophy, University of Durban Westville, 01
(Richard R, "Why we Need a New Ethic for the Environment", Protest And Engagement: Philosophy after Apartheid, Ed. Patrick Giddy, , liam)
Three most significant and pressing factors contributing to the environmental crisis are the ever increasing human population, the energy' crisis, and the abuse and pollution of the earth's natural systems. These and other factors contributing to the environmental crisis can be directly linked to anthropocentric views of the world. The perception that value is located in, and emanates from, humanity has resulted in understanding human life as an ultimate value, superior to all other beings. This has driven innovators in medicine and technology to ever improve our medical and material conditions, in an attempt to preserve human life, resulting in more people being born and living longer. In achieving this aim, they have indirectly contributed to increasing the human population. Perceptions of superiority, coupled with developing technologies have resulted in a social outlook that generally docs not rest content with the basic necessities of life. Demands for more medical and social aid, more entertainment and more comfort translate into demands for improved standards of living Increasing population numbers, together with the material demands of modern society, place ever increasing demands on energy supplies. While wanting a better life is not a bad thing, given the population explosion the current energy crisis is inevitable, which brings a whole host of environmental implications in tow. This is not to say that every improvement in the standard of living is necessarily wasteful of energy or polluting to the planet, but rather it is the cumulative effect of these improvements that is damaging to the environment The abuses facing the natural environment as a result of the energy crisis and the food demand are clearly manifestations of anthropocentric views that treat the environment as a resource and instrument for human ends. The pollution and destruction of the non-human natural world is deemed acceptable, provided that it docs not interfere with other human beings.
Impact: Biopolitics
Ideological Resourcism creates the conditions for a progressivist world order characterized by controlling manipulation
Foreman, 07 (4/1/07, Dave, the Rewilding Institute, “The Arrogance of Resourcism”, )
The ideology of resourcism has had a number of interlocking pieces throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. I would line them up as follows: 1) Professionalism—Trained experts are best qualified to manage natural resources and public lands. 2) Progressivism/Optimism—Progress as a secular religion of material, informational, moral, and organizational advances is key to resourcism, as is an intensely optimistic view of the future benefits of wise management. 3) Engineering—The science behind resourcism is manipulative and controlling—not pure science, but rather technology and engineering.
Environmental managerialism causes biopolitical domination
Luke 99. [Timothy University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University , “Discourses of the Environment”, p. 142-44 , liam]
The ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable development discourse are intriguing. And, perhaps if they were implemented in the spirit that their originators intended, the ecological situation of the Earth might improve. Yet, even after two decades of heeding the theory and practice of such eco-knowledge, sustainable development mostly has not happened, and it most likely will not happen, even though its advocates continue to be celebrated as visionaries. Encircled by grids of ecological alarm, sustainability discourse tells us that today’s allegedly unsustainable environments need to be disassembled, recombined and subjected to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in such enviro-disciplinary frames, any environment could be redirected to fulfil the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives and administrative writs denominated in sustainability values. Sustainability, then, engenders its own forms of ‘environmentality’, which would embed alternative instrumental rationalities beyond those of pure market calculation in the policing of ecological spaces. Initially, one can argue that the modern regime of bio-power formation described by Foucault was not especially attentive to the role of nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault 1976: 138—42). The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human populations to the development of industrial capitalism, however, did generate systems of bio-power. Under such regimes, power/knowledge systems bring ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’, making the manifold disciplines of knowledge and discourses of power into new sorts of productive agency as part of the ‘transformation of human life’ (ibid. 145). Once this threshold was crossed, social experts began to recognize how the environmental interactions of human economics, politics and technologies continually put all human beings’ existence as living beings in question. Foucault divides the environmental realm into two separate but interpenetrating spheres of action: the biological and the historical. For most of human history, the biological dimension, or forces of nature acting through disease and famine, dominated human existence, with the ever present menace of death. Developments in agricultural technologies, as well as hygiene and health techniques, however, gradually provided some relief from starvation and plague by the end of the eighteenth century. As a result, the historical dimension began to grow in importance, as ‘the development of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and the observations and measures relative to man’s life and survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death’ (ibid. 142). The historical then began to envelop, circumscribe or surround the biological, creating interlocking disciplinary expanses for ‘the environmental’. And these environmentalized settings quickly came to dominate all forms of concrete human reality: ‘in the space of movement thus conquered, and broadening and organising that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them’ (ibid.). While Foucault does not explicitly define these spaces, methods and knowledges as ‘environmental’, these enviro-disciplinary manoeuvres are the origin of many aspects of environmentalization. As biological life is refracted through economic, political and technological existence, ‘the facts of life’ pass into fields of control for any discipline of eco-knowledge and spheres of intervention for the management of geo-power. Foucault recognized how these shifts implicitly raised ‘ecological issues’ to the extent that they disrupted and redistributed the understandings provided by the classical episteme for defining human interactions with nature. Living became environmentalized as humans, or ‘a specific living being, and specifically related to other living beings’ (ibid. 143), began to articulate their historical and biological life in profoundly new ways from within artificial cities and mechanical modes of production. Environmentalization arose from ‘this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power’ (ibid.). Strangely, even as he makes this linkage, Foucault does not develop these ecological insights, suggesting that ‘there is no need to lay further stress on the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence’ (ibid. 143—4). Even so, Foucault here found the conjunction needed for ‘the environment’ to emerge as an eco-knowledge formation and/or a cluster of eco-power tactics for an envirodiscipline. As human beings begin consciously to wager their life as a species on the products of their biopolitical strategies and technological systems, a few recognize that they are also wagering the lives of other, or all, species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as just one of many lacunae in his analysis, everything changes as human bio-power systems interweave their operations in the biological environment, penetrating the workings of many ecosystems with the techniques of knowledge and power. Once human power/know ledge formations become the foundation of industrial society’s economic development, they also become a major factor in all terrestrial life-forms’ continued physical survival. Eco-knowledge about geo-power thus becomes through enviro-disciplines a strategic technology that reinvests human bodies — their means of health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating the whole space of existence — with bio-historical significance. It then reframes them within their bio-physical environments, which are now also filled with various animal and plant bodies positioned in geo-physical settings, as essential elements in managing the health of any human ecosystem’s carrying capacity
Biopolitical control destroys value to life and justifies state violence
Luke 1999,[ professor of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute and state university, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx, pg. 165-166, liam]
This command to go anywhere at any time to defend the cause of survival also directs ecodisciplinarians to pursue other equally problematic values on a more global level with the full force of state power and positive science, namely, stability, diversity, and interdependence. A powerful nation-state is no longer empowered simply to defend its territory to protect its populations. It also must identify and police the surroundings of all its many environments to guarantee ecological stability, biological diversity, and environmental interdependence. Because some states are more sustainable than others, their survival imperatives can become guidelines for environmental colonialism. So to survive, the state may choose to impose the status of a green belt, forest preserve, nature reservation, or environmental refuge on other societies. Qates claims that the ecological ethic of stability as “a steady-state” would notresult in stagnation. Such outcomes would, of course, offend the growth fixations of consumers and citizens living in liberal capitalist democracies. On the contrary, he believes that this ethic would mean “directing growth and change in nondestructive ways, generated within the standing pattern that supports life.”6’ But who directs growth and change for whom? Is there a standing pattern that directs life? Does anyone really know enough about it to direct growth in accord with it? In practice, Global Marshall Planners in Washington or New York could use ecological criteria to impose sustainable development of economic growth at home as they also force ecological steady states on others abroad. If India’s millions stay on foot or bicycles, then Germany’s millions will stay in their cars. If Indonesia keeps growing trees, then Japan can keep consuming lumber. And if Brazil’s ranchers keep turning rain forest into cattle ranges, then U.S. suburbanites will get their cheeseburgers. Obviously, a “steadying state” designed and managed by green bureaucrats will be needed to enforce environmentalized stable states of dynamic ecological equilibrium, which Gates identifies as the sine qua non of stability. Ironically, then, green bureaucrats, who are directed to stabilize everyone’s fitness and health, should restructure populations and growth by planning for sustainable patterns in timber harvesting, oil production, agricultural output, land use, and consumer marketing to contain but not end the growth fetishism of mass-consumption capitalism. Gates concurs with Gore and McLaughlin that all present geo-economic national economies run on a paradox: “Whatever is achieved instantly becomes inadequate when measured against the ethic of continual consumption. Satisfaction only creates dissatisfaction, in an accelerating cycle. ‘More’ is an unrealizable goal.”62 Since these consumerist values continually cause more and more damage, the environmentalizing strategies of ecodisciplinary regimes must enforce a new social commitment to their opposites, namely, the willing acceptance of “less” as the moral basis for new ecological values on a social and individual level. For survival’s sake, “the ethical consciousness of earth’s human population must therefore be as ecologically well regulated as the size of the earth’s population.”63 Protecting the whole, in the practice of environmentalizing green bureaucracies, also can become a strange administrative credo of biophilia, or love of life, in a framework of biocentrism, or placing earth-life-nature at the core of green thought and bureaucratic practice. If environments are to be protected, then all the life within them would, of course, anchor the practical forms of human engagement with the world. Yet this emotional commitment to “life,” or life seen as the superorganism of Earth in ecology, might entail a condemnation of humanity in open misanthropy by containing, destroying, or limiting some traditional forms of human living in favor of the earth’s ecological survival. It is not that geo-environmentalists love their lives less but that they might love other animal and plant life more—so green bureaucrats will reason as they prevent some human communities from developing to enhance environmental survivability. Such contradictions actually make sense, because they stand for placing limits on geo-economic excesses in those cases where the survivalist operatives of the green steady state see everyday social policies threatening nonhuman life’s survival and stability. “Where survival of the whole seems threatened,” Gates concludes, “as in issues of extinction and pollution, then the basic ethos of protecting the whole predominates.”64
Ext. Rhetoric Key
Eco managerialists use rhetoric to shape how you view the environment – interrogation is key
Luke 2002. [Timothy University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ,"eco-managerliasim: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge formation," , liam]
Before scientific disciplines and industrial technologies turn its' matter and energy into products, nature must be transformed by discursive processes into natural resources. Once nature is rendered intelligible through such practices, it is used to legitimize many political projects. I think one site for generating, accumulating, and circulating such knowledge about nature, as well as determining which human beings will be to society, is the modern research university, where we sit. As a primary structure for credentialing individual learners and legitimating collective teaching, universities help to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over the past generation, advanced study in environmental sciences on many university campuses, especially in the United States, has become a key source of key representations for the environment, as well as the home base of those scientific disciplines that generate analyses of nature's meanings. These educational operations also produce eco-managerialists, or those professional technical workers with specific knowledge as it has been scientifically or organizationally validated, and the operational power as it is institutionally constructed in governments at various levels, to cope with "environmental problems" on what are believed to be sound scientific and technical grounds. Professional technical experts working on and off campus create disciplinary articulations of various knowledge to generate performative techniques of power over, but also within and through, what is worked up as nature in the managerial structures of modern economies and societies. These institutionalized attempts to capture and contain the forces of nature underpin the strategies of eco-managerialism. Techno-scientific knowledge about the environment, however, is and always has been evolving with changing interpretive fashions, shifting political agendas, developing scientific advances. Such variations, as Foucault asserts designate a will to knowledge that is anonymous, polymorphous, and susceptible to regular transformations, and determined by the play of identifiable dependencies. What are some of these dependencies and perhaps some of these transformations? In this polymorphous combination of anonymous scientific environmental knowledge, with organized market and state power, as Foucault indicates, we find that it traverses and produces things. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance, whose function is repression. Schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources often provide the networks in which the relations of this productive power set the categories of knowledge and the limits of professional practice through the training of eco-managerialism. In accord with the prevailing regimes of truth within science, academic centres of environmental studies reproduce these bodies of practice and types of discourse, which in turn the executive personnel managing contemporary state and social institutions, what they regard as objective, valid, or useful, to facilitate economic growth. From these discourses, one can define, as Foucault suggests, the way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilize their forms and meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal it in what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less than they wish, but in any case leaving massive verbal traces of those thoughts which must be deciphered and restored as far as possible in their representative vivacity. So given these tendencies, might we look at the workings of eco-managerialism? Where life, labour, and language can join in a discourse of environmental studies, one finds another formation of power knowledge which shows how man and his being can be concerned with the things he knows, and know the things that in positivity determine his mode of being in highly vocalized academic constructions of "the environment." Instead, the environment emerges in part as a historical artifact of expert management that is constructed by these kinds of scientific interventions. And in this network of interventions, there is a simulation of spaces and intensification of resources and incitement of discoveries, and a formation of special knowledges that strengthen the control that can be linked to one another as the impericities of nature for academic environmental sciences and studies. And probably in many ways, the key impericity here I would say, is the process of what I call the resourcification of nature. How does nature get turned into resources? The new impericities behind eco-managerialism more or less presumes that the role of nature is one of a rough and ready resourcification for the global economy and national society. That is, the earth must be re-imagined to be little more than a standing reserve, a resource supply centre, a waste reception site. Once presented in this fashion, nature then provides human markets with many different environmental sites for the productive use of resourcified flows of energy, information, and matter, as well as the sinks, dumps, and wastelands for all of the by-products that commercial products leave behind. Nature then is always a political asset. Still, its fungiblization, its liquidification, its capitalization, and eco-managerialism cannot occur without the work of experts whose resourcifying activities prep it, produce it, and then provide it in the global marketplace. The trick in natural resources or environmental affairs education is to appear to be conservationist, while moving in fact, many times, very fast to help fungiblize, liquefy, or capitalize natural resources for a more thorough, rapid, and perhaps intensive utilization.
**Aff
AT: “Resources”
Managerialism is justified when we are trying to save the environment
Doremus, their author, 2000 (Holly Professor of Law, University of California at Davis, Washington & Lee Law Review, Winter 2000, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a New Discourse.”, liam]
Besides potentially inhibiting the creation of large reserves, a strict hands- off strategy is inconsistent with the protection of species, ecosystems, or natural processes. No place in the United States remains entirely unaffected by human actions. Ongoing management efforts are often necessary to compensate for the effect of past actions, or current actions outside the designated reserves. Competition with or predation by alien species, for example, is one of the leading threats to domestic biodiversity. n259 Once introduced, alien species often spread rapidly and are difficult, if not impossible to remove. Protecting native species from the threat of such exotics requires ongoing management. n260 Intensive management may also be required to substitute for [*57] changes in historic fire regimes, n261 predation levels, n262 and other elements of the biophysical environment. Given the extensive changes in background conditions, ecologists tell us that most areas dedicated to the preservation of nature cannot simply be left to their own devices, but will require active human management. n263
The fate of the planet shouldn’t be gambled on philosophical beliefs, we have an obligation to protect the environment
Michaelson, 1998 (Jay . J.D. Yale Law School, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, January 1998, “Geoengineering: A Climate Change Manhattan Project”, liam)
On the political-philosophical side, the question becomes a Rawlsian one: how to maintain "private" philosophical beliefs and yet also engage in "public" political discourse. n234 I suggest that, in this vein, geoengineering may be a type of "principled self-contra- [*134] diction" for a deep environmentalist. Even setting aside the practical arguments just advanced - that it is unwise to bet the planet on changing people's deeply held practices - a deep environmentalist ought in principle to advocate policies that are based not on private philosophical ideas, potentially incommensurate with public discourse, but on the limited shared values of a Rawlsian liberalism. n235 Repairing the climate does not reflect deep environmental ideology as does preventive regulation - hence the Rawlsian "contradiction" - but it may be more in accord with values a deep environmentalist shares, in a liberal state, with a non-environmentalist. As such, it is the Rawlsian choice.
Prefer our unique impacts – they should be preferred over our discourse
Issac, 2002 (Jeffrey, professor of political science at Indiana University, Dissent, Spring 2002, liam)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Alternative to managerialism impossible – prefer consequential impacts
Michaelson, 1998 (Jay , J.D. Yale Law School, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, January 1998, “Geoengineering: A Climate Change Manhattan Project”)
Perhaps, if regulation is unlikely to succeed in any serious way given the current institutional, economic, and social contexts, we might try to change the deep, underlying causes of climate change--a market economy driven by growth in goods and populations, and the productive capability to meet consumer demand. n119 Although most of the discussion of this point will be deferred to part V, it should be clear that such changes are very costly and contentious ones. To say there is a lack of agreement on whether (and how) to remake the world's economic and social structure is surely an understatement. Of course, progress can take place [*103] through evolution rather than revolution, and the role of environmental education, in both shallow and deep modes, should not be minimized. n120 Indeed, it is probably the case that - given the variety of environmental and other issues facing the world - some form of "deep reorientation," however gradual, will eventually be necessary, absent radically new technologies to overcome our current concerns. Unfortunately, in the meantime, several billion people remain committed to consumption-based lifestyles and modes of self-definition. Changing deep structures is likely to be a difficult, time consuming, and potentially divisive process that, while it would alter the fundamental assumptions of present cost-benefit curves and consequently yield some kind of "efficient" result, hardly seems like the policy recommendation for a more urgent problem such as global climate change. Again, though a more thorough treatment of this issue must be postponed to the end of this Article, it is clear for present purposes that a "deep structural" approach would be at least as difficult to achieve and as "costly" as ordinary climate change regulation.
1NC “Rods From God”
"The State is as God walking on Earth"- G.W.F. Hegel
“Rods from God” invokes an omniscient, omnipotent US military with the capability to dominate the entire globe, and creates an image free of the negative implications that normally constrain over-reach of US power.
Kozol 7. (Wendy, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Oberlin College, teaches courses on feminist theories as well as visual culture. Author of several works, including “LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism.” November 30, 2007. “Rods from God.” Based on a book in-progress, titled: “Visible Wars and American Nationalism: Militarization and Visual Culture in the Post-Cold War Period.” ps)
Despite long-standing debates about the viability of missile defense technology and the ramifications of “weaponizing” space, a range of websites — from the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency, to lobbying or advocacy groups, like — use powerful visual rhetoric to sustain the economic, political and military investment in this still questionable technology.
Computer-generated pictures, diagrams, and video scenarios depict satellites and sensors orbiting in space around a peaceful globe. Threat and defense are completely disembodied. There are no “viewers”; no “people” making decisions about when to send out interceptors; and no face of the “enemy.” Devoid of any constraining conditions, everything functions to plan 100% of the time. And, because every “kill” is a clean kill, free of impact on populations or environments, nobody ever gets hurt.
This illustration, appearing on the Global Security website, extends U.S. military technological power to a wider universe by positioning planets and stars in the composition. The beauty of the blue planet, so common in popular discussion of Space travel, provides the color scheme for the picture by bathing the technology in the same reassuring tones.
Against the racially empowering function of threats from rogue nations, pictures like this imagine American interceptors destroying enemy missiles in Space. The illustration prominently foregrounds the American flag on the satellite, while a laser emanating from the satellite furthest in the back successfully hits its target. A small white light in the background appears as the attacking missile, thus diminishing the threat while emphasizing the omnipotent power of the satellites to protect not just America, but the entire globe.
Importantly, missile defense advocates also rely on moral claims to justify these defense systems (which these “almighty” and “heavenly” visual objects reinforce, as well). For instance, “Rods from God,” is the nickname for an Air Force Space Command missile defense program. Technology and religion combine in this label to invoke an image of omniscient power by the U.S. military to protect the nation and its allies from space.
In claiming Space as an extension of national territory, the Air Force Space Command describes themselves as the “guardians of the High Frontier.” Mobilizing an imperialist logic of military dominance, such references invoke a moral geography based on a mythic ideal about the founding of the United States. As General Lance Lord, former head of the Air Force Space Command states in this NYT article:
“Space superiority is not our birthright but it is our destiny. . . . Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future”
Unlike spectacles of violence and suffering more typical of war imagery, Space is a blank screen for clean technology that never hurts and always protects. Images from the war on terror — including photographs of suicide bombings, American casualties, Haditha, and of course Abu Ghraib — have provoked enormous attention and an occasion for many to critique American Occupation policies.
When we ask the question, how is it that people can look at pictures of suffering and then look away, perhaps it is because they are finding something easier or more comforting to look at.
The term “Rods from God” creates a dangerous understanding of the government as the new religion of an omnipotent “God,” demanding ultimate loyalty and infinite power.
Griffin 5. (David Ray, distinguished theologian, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont School of Theology. Author and editor of over twenty books, known as one of the country’s leading ‘process’ theologians. “Response to Ian Markham” in “Conversations in Religion & Theology” Volume 3, Issue 2, 11 October 2005. ps)
It would appear that his argument is not based on the view that there is something uniquely virtuous about the Bush administration. His argument seems instead to be that this administration, being an American administration, would not do such a thing.
But if that is the argument, then surely the kind of information contained in Zinn’s book is relevant. Markham says, for example, that ‘Americans [do not] want to destroy cultures, peoples and dominate nations’. But Americans certainly did a good job of destroying the culture of native Americans and the millions of Africans that were imported to be sold as slaves. More recently, moreover, American political and corporate leaders have shown no reluctance to destroy local cultures in various parts of the world when they conflicted with the profits of US corporations.
Finally, Markham’s statement that Americans do not want to ‘dominate nations’ makes me wonder if he has read Zinn’s book or any critiques of American foreign policy by authors such as William Blum, Noam Chomsky, or Chalmers Johnson.
If he assumes that all the heinous policies reported by these authors can be dismissed because the writers, being leftists, simply distort the truth (as he suggests in his one mention of Chomsky), what does he do about the fact that Chalmers Johnson had been a conservative supporter of American foreign policy until his study of certain facts changed his understanding of the nature of that policy? And what does Markham do about the fact that although Andrew Bacevich is still a conservative, he now not only says that US foreign policy has been based on a ‘grand strategy’ to create a military-political-economic-cultural empire of global scope but also ridicules the notion that the purpose of this empire is ‘the promotion of peace, democracy, and human rights [rather than] the pursuit of self-interest’?
Is Markham not given pause by the fact that Bacevich, having said that the aim of the US military has been ‘to achieve something approaching omnipotence’, mocks the claim that while such power wielded by others would be threatening, such power ‘is by definition benign’ in America’s hands because of our nation’s unique virtue?
In making this statement about omnipotence, Bacevich was referring to the Pentagon’s relatively new doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, according to which America’s present dominance on land, at sea, and in the air will be supplemented with dominance in space achieved by the new branch of the Air Force called the US Space Command. I discussed this program in my book, quoting a mission statement that says: ‘U.S. Space Command – dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment’ – not, it should be noted, to protect human rights and foster democracy. Indeed, in explaining the need for this extraordinary type of protection for ‘US interests and investment’, this document says that ‘[t]he globalization of the world economy . . . will continue with a widening between “haves” and “have-nots” ’ – the point of which is that the US Space Command will be needed to protect American ‘haves’ from the world’s increasingly angry ‘have-nots’.
I went on to point out that this program involves putting weapons on satellites in space, including laser weapons that could be used to destroy the military satellites put up by other countries. The document announced, in fact, that the US Space Command would seek the power ‘to deny others the use of space’. To illustrate the fact that the purposes of the program are offensive, not merely defensive, I quoted the logo of one of the US Space Command’s divisions: ‘In Your Face from Outer space’. I pointed out, moreover, that the part of this program that sounds purely defensive, the ‘missile defense system’, has an offensive purpose: to overcome the capacity of other nations to deter the United States from attacking them (NPH 96–98).
Markham, in assuring his readers that Americans have no desire to ‘dominate nations’, ignores my discussion of this program. Perhaps he assumes that it can be dismissed as a fantasy created by my antiAmericanism. It may be important, therefore, to point out that the US military’s intention to weaponize space, previously known only by a few people, was revealed in a New York Times front-page story by Tim Weiner, published in May 2005.
Pointing out that the Air Force is seeking a presidential directive to field ‘offensive and defensive space weapons’, Weiner quotes the head of the Space Command, General Lance Lord, as saying that the goal is ‘space superiority’ defined as ‘freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack’.
Although we should resist any temptation to base a theological critique of this program on the fact that it is headed by a man addressed as ‘General Lord’, we can legitimately point out that the name of one of its programs, ‘Rods from God’, does suggest that it seeks the kind of destructive omnipotence attributed to God by traditional theists – destructive power that is intended to be used to dominate other nations. Weiner refers to a strategy called Global Strike, which, according to Lord, will involve the ‘incredible capability’ to destroy things ‘anywhere in the world . . . in 45 minutes.’
For several reasons, accordingly, the factual record undermines Markham’s sanguine statements about US foreign policy. But what about his most central claim, that American leaders would not kill their own people to create a casus belli? Another part of the historical record, which was discussed in my book but ignored by Markham, was the plan called Operation Northwoods. Developed in 1962 and signed by all the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, this plan contained proposals to kill Americans and then blame Cuba as a pretext to invade it (NPH 101–03).
Markham’s various reasons for dismissing my evidence on a priori grounds, therefore, crumble in the face of past and present facts about US policy. It is not, to be sure, irrational to have a priori judgments about what kinds of things are possible and impossible. We could not get along without such judgments. To be rational, however, these judgments must be consistent with the relevant empirical facts. And yet Markham provides no evidence that he has sought to see whether his judgments about American political and military leaders, on the basis of which he calls my book irresponsible, are in fact consistent with readily available evidence.
To illustrate further: While arguing that America would not commit evils comparable to those committed by Nazi Germany, Markham admits that America does have some imperfections. ‘It is true’, he says, ‘that sometimes America makes morally ambiguous decisions’. That seems to be the worst that, from Markham’s perspective, can be said about some of the decisions that have been made by American leaders. However, the kinds of books to which I referred earlier are filled with decisions that from a moral point of view cannot simply be called ‘ambiguous’. To give a few examples: the refusal to allow European Jews to come to America to escape the Holocaust; the decision by the US military, after having dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to launch a 1000-plane bombing raid on Japan after its surrender had been announced (but not yet officially received); the overthrow of democratically elected governments in, among other places, Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954; the massive bombing of North Korea, which killed some two million people, mainly civilians; the attempt to foment a civil war against the democratically elected government of Indonesia in 1957, which resulted in 40,000 deaths, followed in 1965 by a fabricated coup attempt and a bloodbath, aided by a list of names supplied by US officials, that resulted in one to two million deaths; America’s war against Vietnam, which was launched by violating the Geneva Accords in 1954 and escalated by fabricating the Tonkin Gulf incident, which resulted in the deaths of two to three million Vietnamese as well as over 68,000 Americans; and, more recently, the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, which evidently led to the deaths of over 500,000 children.
I would hope that Markham, as a Christian ethicist, would agree that these decisions were not merely ‘ambiguous’.
V. Concluding Theological Reflections
Markham speaks of my book as ‘a significant departure from process theology’. That is true. It is not a theological book. But it is, I would insist, an appropriate book for a theologian to write. Indeed, if the US government arranged for the attacks of 9/11 in order to advance what Richard Falk has called its ‘global domination project’, as I believe, then there is no topic that is currently more important for theologians to address.
Religion involves, as Paul Tillich said, our ultimate concern or, as Josiah Royce more aptly put it, our ultimate loyalty. According to Christianity and other theistic religions, our ultimate loyalty should be to God, understood as the creator and lover of all human beings, indeed of all life whatsoever. Religion at its best leads us to transcend the human tendency to be concerned only with ourselves, or at most our tribe, in favour of concern for the welfare of all.
There has been a strong tendency of human beings, however, to seek to enlist religion in their drive to promote themselves, their tribe, their race, their gender, their religion, or their nation in a competition with others. Religion at its worst, serving this sinful tendency, is idolatrous. The form of idolatry that has been most dangerous since the rise of the nation-state system has been Nationalism, in which one’s nation becomes, de facto, the object of ultimate loyalty. National leaders encourage this idolatrous loyalty through various forms of propaganda directed at their own citizens.
At the center of our own nation’s propaganda since its inception has been the myth of American ‘exceptionalism’, according to which America is free from the sins and weaknesses that led the nations of the Old World into corruption, war, and imperialism.
One expression of this myth has been the widespread idea (now rejected by Andrew Bacevich) that enormous power in American hands is not dangerous because our nation, unlike others, uses its power to promote freedom, democracy, and human rights, not selfish interests.
Although this myth was traditionally based on the idea that America is a uniquely Christian nation, it is actually, from a Christian perspective, a heretical idea, because it contradicts the doctrine of original sin – no less than did the Communist doctrine that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be salutary because the proletariat was free from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The doctrine of original sin, at its best, says that human beings cannot be divided into those with sinful tendencies and those without. The political implication of this doctrine is that no individual, faction, class, race, institution, or nation can be trusted with unchecked power. Lord Acton expressed this implication in his famous dictum: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.
If we combine Acton’s insight, Bacevich’s observation that the US military has been seeking ‘something approaching omnipotence’, and Chalmers Johnson’s statements that the United States is ‘a military juggernaut intent on world domination’ and that it, in fact, already then the notion that America’s political and military leaders are corrupt enough to have orchestrated 9/11 to increase their power is, far from too fantastic to believe, just the kind of act we should expect.
Rods from God is explicitly destructive of life, and encourages the shift of communication to a strategic role which ultimately turns humans into weaponry and eliminates ethics.
Berland 9. (Jody, “Animal and/as Medium: Symbolic Work in Communicative Regimes.” “The Global South” Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2009. Project Muse. ps)
As an invention, something like Rods from God is obviously far more overtly military and destructive of life than the iPhone. But it would be neither thinkable nor economically feasible without the growing market for digital and satellite communication technologies.
Rods from God is an outer space weapon being developed by the Pentagon that deploys digital information processing and search capabilities to guide lethally projected tungsten rods to targets on or beneath the earth's surface. Guided by satellite and driven by its own kinetic energy, the Rods from God is heralded as an exciting, unprecedentedly powerful, fearsomely expensive innovation in the corporate-military-research-and- development infrastructure. The weapon is the brainchild of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, which pursues the application of digital and network theory to war. The RMA was instituted in order to establish what Brian Murphy describes as a "Continuous [End Page 56] four dimensional physical and cyberspace grid through which all warfighting relationships are linked" (Murphy 2007). This "revolution" replaces earth-bound technologies of the military arsenal by shifting communication from a tactical to a strategic role (ibid.).15 Over time, this process will permit militaries to replace human soldiers with cybernetic avatars, so that human skill is displaced onto the weaponry (Coker 135) and obviating the need for soldiers to enact skill, presence, consent, sacrifice, or ethics.16
Moving at unimaginable speed, tungsten rods can burn and destroy targeted matter far below the earth's surface. Despite their unique horrific fascination, they are the logical end of a military-corporate partnership which is redefining both war and communication by focusing on the relationship between them. Between 1992 and 2004, the Pentagon was strategically transformed into C4 ISR: Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Intelligence gathering, Surveillance, Reconnaissance. According to Murphy, 25 per cent of its contractors specialize in information technology and have not held previous military contracts. Canadians are not untouched by this trend. In 2006 Telus reduced its staff by a cruel 25 per cent and won a contract to supply the Department of Defense with "global telecommunication services" (Kirby 42). Today Telus generates 44% of its revenues from wireless communications which are being lavishly marketed to consumers in both developed and "developing" countries.
The aff’s State-as-God is delusional and ultimately results in mass murder and the destruction of the world.
Watson 1. (Roland, Roland Watson is the author of various reports and writer at Lew Rockwell. “The State as God.” June 1, 2001. ps)
The State may indeed be God’s delegate for a particular duty at a particular time and place but when the modern State attempts to take upon itself the incommunicable attributes of God then there is a monstrosity in the making.
For consider the omniscience of God and the pretence the State makes to this unattainable goal. Thanks to the massive storage and access capabilities of computers, the State has within its grasp all knowledge within its self-appointed horizons. Like God, the State has access to information about us which we can only guess at or have long forgotten or lost.
And as the eyes of God run to and fro across the Earth beholding the deeds of men, so the State aspires to an omnipresence which allows it to be present in every CCT camera or hidden wiretap. From the feared ubiquity of an army of hidden informers in a Stalinist country to the sophistication of supercomputers tirelessly scanning untold myriads of emails, the State strives to be as God where God does not intend.
And from a pretended omnipresence and omniscience proceeds a delusional omnipotence which has wreaked havoc and murder across the centuries in the hands of the basest of men. And if the State muses that the searing shock wave of its fusion blasts are akin to the breath of God and that it has become the Shatterer of worlds in the words of Oppenheimer then surely the time for change has come.
But from its presumption that, like God in eternity, it will never pass away we see an attribute it can never aspire to emulate and that is self-sufficiency. The theologian states that God has no need of anyone or anything to sustain Him, but the State is a parasite which dies with the last willing taxpayer. Turn off the supply of tax dollars and gilt-edged securities and this creature dies a death and is cast to the dogs.
Therein lies the solution. Only that which is self-sufficient can claim deification. Hegel watched as one god in Napoleonic France overthrew another in the Prussians. His dialecticism attempted to synthesise a State which objectified Absolute Truth and which could on the one hand avoid a centralised slavedom but also eschew the antinomianism of unbridled hedonism.
1NC “Rods From God” deux
Dr. Strangelove in Space or, How I learned to stop worrying and fetishize “Rods from God”
The affirmative’s weapons systems are fundamentally only an expression of sublimated phallic worship and a race for dominance of a feminized enemy.
Zaitchik 5. (Alexander, American freelance journalist who has written for: AlterNet, Salon, The New Republic, The Nation, Reason, The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Former staffer of the New York Press, served as an investigative reporting fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded the online magazine Freezerbox. Author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. “Dr. Strangefeld: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Long-Rod Penetra” Jan 4 2005. ps)
Twenty years later, feminist critics of Ronald Reagan's arms race picked up the Strangelovian thread, snickering in symposia and books at the homoerotic jargon infusing so much nuclear strategy. Leading the charge was the Australian freeze activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, whose 1984 Missile Envy described the arms race as the psychotic expression of sublimated phallic worship. Chunks of GDP, she noted, go to developing missiles that "release maximum payload" all over the other guy's most "sensitive" locations, after "entering and penetrat[e]ing deep inside" his territory, catching him with his pants down if possible. Even defense is all about who has the hardest silos and the most mobile units. Crises require "stiff" resolve.
Another 20 years after Strangelove, U.S. war planners still don't get the joke. Exhibit A is the "Long-Rod Penetrator," which today's Pentagon longingly envisions for its future arsenal of space weapons. To work, 40 Long-Rod Penetrators must be launched into low-earth orbit at a cost of $8 billion, which would make the program the most expensive dildo collection in the world.
The system would involve blasting beams of tungsten or uranium into space, then releasing them high above their terrestrial targets. The idea- the $8 billion idea- is essentially to recreate the old Road Runner cartoon where an ACME crate comes whistling out of the sky, pounding Wile E. Cayote into the ground. Considering that the U.S. military already has cruise missiles, ICBMs and billion-dollar stealth bombers well suited to such tasks, dropping barbells from outer space isn't that far on the stupidity scale from Dr. Evil's plan in Austin Powers to destroy the world by triggering a massive volcano.
But space weapons like the Penetrator are no joke. The nation's political-military-defense-industry leadership sees outer space-currently a global commons populated by bits of flotsam and peaceful beeping satellites-as a future theater of conflict. It believes the U.S. must dominate this "ultimate high-ground" and establish "full-spectrum dominance." It is the logical extension of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. It's also a way to ballast defense stocks for decades to come.
Then there are space lasers-an idea that refused to die with Edward Teller-and something called the "Spaceplane," a hypersonic bomber that swoops in from outer space. Like the Penetrator, both are very expensive ways of duplicating existing U.S.-military capabilities. In the case of the former, there is also the debilitating fact that lasers attenuate upon atmosphere, i.e., they don't work when it's cloudy, and can be defended against with about an inch of common cork. The Pentagon will spend billions on this weapon; our enemies will defeat it with a case of cheap wine.
The Sec. of Defense, the John Holmes of space weapons, is especially horny for such toys. Before taking on his current job, the man his boss calls "Rumstud" chaired the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, whose 2001 report remains the foundational document for all space-weapons planning. Though the more fantastic elements are a ways off, Rumsfeld could oversee the breaking of the space barrier as early as next year, when the Missile Defense Agency plans to launch its first intercepts into orbit. By 2008, the MDA hopes to have an entire fleet of "kinetic energy kill vehicles" in place to strike targets in space.
Characterizing the affirmative as a defensive weapons system is just a justification for weaponization of space- this sets in motion a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy.
Zaitchik 5. (Alexander, American freelance journalist who has written for: AlterNet, Salon, The New Republic, The Nation, Reason, The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Former staffer of the New York Press, served as an investigative reporting fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded the online magazine Freezerbox. Author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. “Dr. Strangefeld: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Long-Rod Penetra” Jan 4 2005. ps)
The line connecting missile defense and space weapons is direct, thick and no secret. Before chairing the Space Commission, Rumsfeld chaired its precursor, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, whose 1998 report recommended immediate U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and construction of the troubled land-based missile defense system currently costing us $10 billion a year. The symbiosis between missile defense and space weapons is also evident in the fact that former Missile Defense Agency director Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish is among Bush's leading candidates to head NASA.
Some experts believe the Pentagon doesn't care if the land-based stuff works or not. The real purpose of building the Alaska system, says Victoria Sampson of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, is an end-run around "the taboo on placing weapons in space." By calling the early stages of the grand plan a "land-based defensive system," Sampson thinks planners are trying to avoid public debate over the contentious issue of militarizing the heavens.
Not that there's anything warm or squishy about the world's overwhelming opposition to weaponizing space. China and Russia have been pressing hard for a treaty banning space weapons not because they fear space debris and radiation will obstruct our study of the cosmos-though it will-but because they don't want generals at U.S. Space Command blowing their satellites out of the sky like targets in some 80s video game. Satellites are sitting paper ducks compared to missiles or protected ground targets, and there's nothing easier than blitzing your opponent down below after "blinding" him high above.
Like all weapons systems, missile defense and space weapons are "defensive" or "offensive" depending on which side of the barrel you're looking down. Since missile "defense" has proved so easily defeated or tricked in battle simulations, the system makes much more sense as an offensive weapon against fixed-orbit targetsnot missiles flying through space at the speed of sound. As for space-based weapons, U.S. officials sometimes cite the need to protect American satellites in urging their deployment, but there is currently no threat to U.S. satellites that can be countered from space. Space weapons and missile defense only make sense as part of an offensive strategy.
By starting an arms race in space, the U.S. will be putting a self-fulfilling prophecy into motion, and not for the first time. The entire nuclear era is the story of U.S. research spreading into other hands, as scientific knowledge tends to do. Suitcase nukes, to pick just one relevant example, resulted from a crash nuclear miniaturization program at MIT in the 70s. Anything we invent and put into play will eventually be arrayed against us. To stop the dynamic from starting, you need to give treaties a chance.
AFF – RfG
“Rods from God” is not the formal name of the program- it’s just an unofficial nickname.
Douglas 5. (C., author for Defense News, part of Simple Machines Forum, part of Simple Machines LLC. “Rods From God” May 20, 2005. ps)
Another Air Force space program nicknamed 'Rods From God,' The New York Times says, "aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon."
Is there any connection between this experimental work now with the XSS-11 and this amazingly titled 'Rods From God'?
Not really. They are for different missions. The USAF has also been studying that concept which is formally known now as the 'Hyper Velocity Rod Bundles.' Since the late 1980s to early 1990s, when I was at Defense News, I did a story on one of the programs. It was at that time called the 'Long Rod Penetrator Program' and the idea is that you have the tungsten rods that would hurtle out of space and supposedly be able to bury themselves deep in the ground and hit hard at a target. It's actually not very simple to do that. The laws of physics are against you in many ways. You have to go so fast to get down, but if you are going too fast you are not going to be able to penetrate because you're going to burn up in the atmosphere. So, there are a lot of physical problems with that and it's not a new concept. It's something the USAF did study in the 1990s and sort of put away on the shelf and said this is not doable.
It's now been resurrected in some papers of the USAF. The mention of this system comes from something called the "FY2003 US Transformation Flight Plan," which is a document the USAF does every year that looks at where they intend to be ten to fifteen or twenty years down the road, the kind of capabilities they want to have. This system was cited in the 2003 document as something the USAF would like to have in the 2015 to 2030 time frame.
I don't know of monies being spent on this program in the same way as the XSS-11 has already been spent and is operating. I don't know of any monies in the budget for the Rods From God that are in a planning paper.
Do you know who named it?
(laughs) Well, the nickname has been around forever. That's not its real name. Its real name is Hyper Velocity Rod Bundles (HVRB) and it used to be called the Long Rod Penetrator (LRP). But even back in the 1990s, the nickname for it was the Rods From God.
Which gives the idea of a metaphor of Jupiter up there throwing down...
Throwing down lightning bolts, exactly! I think that's exactly why it was nicknamed that. I don't think it's an official USAF nickname.
1NC “Science”
“This only is certain, that there is nothing certain; and nothing more miserable and yet more arrogant than man.”
-Pliny the Elder
The rhetoric of science advances a false view of space as apolitical and rational, justifying any space policy in the name of that science.
Fernau 9. (Fletcher, research coordinator at the JJP VA Center. Former administrative support at American University, advised by Dr. Peter Howard, adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service at American University. “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context: How Have Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?” . Capstone Project for Honors in International Studies, May, 2009. ps)
Eisenhower includes the standard nod to the military potential of space, but the main rhetorical commonplace he uses is “science” (and technology). Space is going to give us better versions of what we have now: airplanes, engineering, and science. Science is the rhetorical commonplace Eisenhower uses to legitimate his preference for a civilian space agency. A civilian agency is preferable, he argues, because: . . . space exploration holds promise of adding importantly to our knowledge of the earth, the solar system, and the universe, and because it is of great importance to have the fullest cooperation of the scientific community at home and abroad in moving forward in the fields of space science and technology. Moreover, a civilian setting for the administration of space function will emphasize the concern of our Nation that outer space be devoted to peaceful and scientific purposes.”
Eisenhower usually discusses space in the context of scientific advancement. A May 14, 1958 statement reiterates support for a civilian agency for scientific reasons. “Science” as a rhetorical commonplace was suited to Eisenhower’s style. His policy was for a measured, rationally planned and, importantly, civilian space program to go forward on the United States terms. Science, as popularly understood, was conceptually linked to such a policy direction. Science was rational, which served both to legitimate the administration’s space policy (“If the scientists say X is necessary we should do it”) as well as to deflect the competitive “space race” mentality that Eisenhower wanted to avoid. Science was supposed to be apolitical, something which divorced it from the rhetoric of the Cold War. Science was a primarily civilian profession, which again helped to avoid militarism and the Cold War.
The use of this rhetoric ultimately fails to create a role for ordinary citizens- reduces public involvement in the space program and guts solvency.
Fernau 9. (Fletcher, research coordinator at the JJP VA Center. Former administrative support at American University, advised by Dr. Peter Howard, adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service at American University. “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context: How Have Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?” . Capstone Project for Honors in International Studies, May, 2009. ps)
Here is where Eisenhower’s use of science as a rhetorical commonplace failed him.
As discussed above, stressing scientific advancement in his rhetoric did help Eisenhower to achieve his policy agenda, perhaps most notably by leading to the creation of a civilian space agency.
Ultimately, however, it was a decision that would have negative implications for the way Eisenhower’s policies were perceived. Krug notes that Eisenhower’s “scientific plan” approach, “failed to create a role for the ‘ordinary citizen.’”
The plan, especially when compared with the tangible achievements of the Soviet Union being trumpeted in the global media, failed to stir the national imagination.
A look at the language Eisenhower used to describe his space program compared with Kennedy’s suggests why his “plan” never caught on. The most commonly used words include “committee” and “agency” while Kennedy’s speeches repeatedly use words like “new” and “future.” These were terms designed to stir the imagination. From a practical standpoint Eisenhower’s plan might have been the most logical space program, but confronted with political realities it was not sustainable.
The word science creates a framework which excludes the average citizen, allowing only specialists to participate in the public sphere.
Fernau 9. (Fletcher, research coordinator at the JJP VA Center. Former administrative support at American University, advised by Dr. Peter Howard, adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service at American University. “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context: How Have Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?” . Capstone Project for Honors in International Studies, May, 2009. ps)
“Science” as a rhetorical commonplace is also difficult for Americans to relate to. Certainly science was a good thing, something the U.S. should lead in, but it was also the domain of specialists, like Von Braun and the German scientists brought over from Europe. There is little room in such a conceptual framework for the average citizen, besides an exhortation to do well in school. A space program ambitious enough to catch up with and best the Soviets would require tremendous investment, as Kennedy doubtless knew, and such spending required public support science alone could not generate. While assertions of the scientific benefits of space exploration are never absent from Kennedy’s rhetoric on the issue, it is clear that the advancement of science alone did not provide the necessary rhetorical ammunition.
1NC “Security”
Discourse of “Security” justifies intervention and colonialist violence against we construct as “enemies”
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
"Security" is another bulwark of the "new world-order." This is not surprising, for "development" requires the creation of conditions that facilitate its implementation and that ensure the obedience, if not the subservience, of those to be "developed." Security, as a motive for ordering, has been a useful distraction for this purpose, as is demonstrated by its transformation from a precept of coexistence to a common cause of globalization. From its very conception, the current framework of international order, constructed through the United Nations Charter, had as its fundamental rationale the creation of conditions of security. Born out of the expressed aspirations of the Atlantic Charter26 amid the early phases of the Second World War, the postwar UN Charter begins with words that were intended to resonate generations down the line: "We the Peoples of the United Nations Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind ..... 27 With these visions of an order freed from the madness of states in conflict, there was created a basis for collective responsibility in the preservation of peace-the collective security regime under the supervision of the Security Council, and particularly, its "Permanent Members," as stipulated in Chapter VII of the UN Charter.28 Many further refinements to these high ideals have since been made as the post-UN Charter world-order evolves. With the end of formal colonialism, attention was transferred in the 1960s and 1970s to the perceived importance of elaborating on principles of non-aggression and non- intervention. The 1980s and 1990s have seen a reversal of enthusiasms, however, as interest is being increasingly expressed, especially within '"Western" states, for a more "collective" undertaking of responsibility in matters of security. This includes the forwarding of arguments in favor of "humanitarian intervention" in cases of "internar' conflicts.29 These trends in the changing outlook on "security" and its relationship to "sovereignty" have continued, and have recently resulted in the formation of a permanent
International Criminal Court to bring to justice perpetrators of "genocide," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."30 Ever so gradually, it seems, the "new world-order" is moving away from the statist pillars of sovereignty and domestic jurisdiction to a globalist notion of collective rights and responsibilities. Yet, as the following two observations on the nature of the global "security" landscape demonstrate, the realities of ordering that have
flowed from reiterations of the commitment to non-violence have failed to establish a legacy of security for the majority of the global population: The period since 1945 may be regarded as a long peace only in the restricted sense that there has been no war between major powers. In other respects, and for much of the world, it has been a period of frequent wars. . . . By one estimate, between 1945 and 1989 there were 138 wars, resulting in some 23 million deaths .... All 138 wars were fought in the Third World, and many were fuelled by weapons provided by the two major powers [the United States and the Soviet Union] or their allies.31 The twentieth-century is a period of history which, in the words of anthropologist Marvin Harris, has seen "a war to end all wars followed by a war to make the world safe for democracy, followed by a world full of military dictatorships." We were then promised a New World-order as the reward for agreeing to the Gulf War, as the end of the Cold War gave way to a seemingly endless series of intra-state wars which the international community is unwilling or unable to bring to order.32 Once again, from the perspective of the ordered, the order of security has proved to be the ideological weapon for the systematic infliction of violence. It is not so much the order of security that is of interest here, but rather, the ordering which takes place in its guise. And with the passing of history, so has the legitimizing claim for the necessity of violent ordering for "security" purposes-fascism, colonialism, communism, capitalism (depending on the ideological orientation of the claimant), terrorism (particularly of the Islamic bent). There is always an enemy, sometimes internal, sometimes external, threatening the well-being
of the people. The languages of nationalism and sovereignty, of peace and collective security, constructed to suit whichever threat happens to be in fashion, are passionately employed; the anarchy that is a Hobbesian state of
nature is always the prophesied consequence of the lack of order that is impending. And the price that the "ordered" has to pay for all this "security" in the post-colonial, new world-order?: the freedom of those who order to be violent! From a "nationalist" standpoint, the rhetoric would insist that the security of the state is paramount, all else flowing from it. By this perspective, the state, that prize which was (re)gained from the colonial epoch, that jewel to be protected by the international order of "collective security," becomes the expression of the dignity of the "people," no questions asked.33 From the anti-colonial struggle, from independence, the reasoning flows naturally, it seems, that the State is to be preserved from any challenge. The police, the military, and the secret service, purportedly given sight and hearing by the eyes and the ears of "the people," are the trophies of "independence." Overnight, the term "freedom fighter" is banished from the vocabulary of the state, the notion of the "terrorist" becomes its replacement. Overnight, the revolution is terminated, with "counter-revolution" becoming the label for any attempt to challenge the new status quo. Overnight, supposedly, the basic structures for freedom from violence are achieved-the condition of "security" that must be preserved is attained.
AT: “Security” K2 Respond
Wrong- In the current security order, genocide is often ignored because of diplomacy and protection of national interests- It’s all just posturing
Nayar 99 University of Warwick School of Law (Jayan, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, “SYMPOSIUM: RE-FRAMING INTERNATIONAL LAW FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Orders of Inhumanity”, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Hein Online SW)
Of course, in the interests of "fairness," we must begin by giving the benefit of the doubt to the assumption that it is for the victims of insecurity that the orders of security should occupy our minds. I have one simple difficulty with this, however: the after-the-event rhetoric of "security" is no security. Security is not an anticipation of the future, it is a state of being in
the present. I anticipate a counter-argument: "We must engage in projections of orders of security to avoid the 'mistakes' of the past, to ensure that this (whatever the 'this' is that is historically relevant and topical) barbarism never happens again." Perhaps this is a valid argument, but again, the worrying genre of "new beginning"-talk may be detected. And new beginnings have a way of (re)appearing and disappearing, of being remembered and forgotten. Never has this been so blatantly exposed as in the "barbaric" events that unfolded in 1999. Kosovo and East Timor provide us with the bloody realities of both dimensions of the rhetoric of order in relation to human (in)security as the next millennium is contemplated. The events in Kosovo heralded, in the rhetoric of those who order the world, a new beginning. Remembered were "our" abhorrence of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and our unwillingness to stand aside and permit its happening, regardless of the fact that this was a conflict within the territories of a "sovereign" state. The "world," in the case of Kosovo, had to move to communicate the message, loudly and clearly, through the explosion of bombs and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, that "we" would not tolerate the perpetuation of genocidal policies, anywhere, anytime, lest we are all dehumanized by our inaction and acquiescence. Indeed, a "just war." The situation in East Timor heralds, as has happened so many times in the past, the disappearance of the enthusiastic and gung-ho effecting of this new beginning-again, just months after its apparent birth. No official proclamation (and this has historical precedent35), has declared those words of judgment-genocide or ethnic cleansing. There has been no outspoken naming of barbarism or repugnance of the Indonesian regime and army in their encouragement of "militia" violence, no rhetoric of the affront to all humanity in the brutalities there, all forgotten once again as we return to the old familiarities of "billiard-ball" diplomacy and negotiation, of pragmatic, "realist" policies and national/regional interests, of bureaucratic/logistical complexities and sovereign consent for "assistance." All this in a situation where the authority of Indonesia over the "territory" (not to mention its people) had never been accepted by the UN (not to mention the Timorese).36 Alas, it was just a war-24 years of it.37
***NON-WORD PICS
1NC Government Code
Government code is inaccessible- confusing grammatical and definitional norms within US code discourage public participation in politics.
Liberman 11. (Mark, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, Faculty Director of College Houses and Academic Services, Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science. “An independent establishment is an establishment which is not part of an independent establishment” April 20, 2011. ps)
However, one of Matt Negrin's complaints struck a chord with me, though perhaps not for the reason Matt intended:
How do you know if your agency will be subject to the new layman’s rules? Sunstein explains: “The Act and this guidance apply to all ‘executive agencies’ as defined under 5 U.S.C. § 105.”
What’s that thing? See footnote No. 2: “Section 105 defines ‘executive agency’ as an ‘Executive department, a Government corporation, and an independent establishment.’ The definitions for ‘executive department,’ ‘government corporation’ and ‘independent establishment’ are found in 5 U.S.C. §§ 101, 103, and 104.”
Hope you have your U.S.C. §§ handy.
It's not hard these days to find the relevant sections of the "United States Code" (another acronym!) — web search turns up 5 U.S.C. §§ 101-105 easily enough. But understanding them is another matter.
My own pet peeve about the language of laws and regulations is carelessness about the scope and interpretation of conjunctions. Matt quotes footnote No. 2 of Prof. Sunstein's memo
Section 105 defines “executive agency” as an “Executive department, a Government corporation, and an independent establishment.”
And indeed it does. 5 U.S.C. § 105 reads in its entirety:
For the purpose of this title, "Executive agency" means an Executive department, a Government corporation, and an independent establishment.
This seems to say that an organization must be all three of those things at once in order to quality as an "executive agency". But I'm sure that this is wrong — the context and the logic of the situation strongly suggest that the intent is disjunctive, what any ordinary person would mean by saying that "Q is X, Y, or Z", not "Q is X, Y, and Z". In my opinion, this usage is manifestly unclear and confusing. But the problem is not "technical and acronym-filled language", the problem is misuse (or maybe this is lawyerly use?) of the common, plain, and ordinary word and.
Misconjunction is not the only confusing use of plain language in this passage. 5 U.S.C. § 104 says that
For the purpose of this title, "independent establishment" means -
(1) an establishment in the executive branch (other than the United States Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission) which is not an Executive department, military department, Government corporation, or part thereof, or part of an independent establishment; and
(2) the Government Accountability Office.
Stripping away some of the underbrush (and ignoring the ambiguous scope of "or part thereof"), we learn that an "independent establishment" is "an establishment in the executive branch … which is not .. part of an independent establishment". I'm sure that this is an important stipulation, but to a lay reader, it seems either self-contradictory (if an establishment is considered to be part of itself) or superfluous (if an establishment is not part of itself). I'm left wondering what legal technicality this clause might be intended to introduce or avoid. And again, the source of my confusion is a simple construction using plain and simple words.
I'll close with another case of ambiguous coordination, from the opening of the Plain Writing Act of 2010:
An Act
To enhance citizen access to Government information and services by establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly, and for other purposes.
When I first read this noun phrase, I thought the Act was establishing that Government documents should be written clearly and for other purposes. This seems to be true. We certainly don't want to encourage federal employees to produce documents for no reason other than to display their pellucid prose style. But in fact, I said to myself, this is so obviously true that the phrase can't be meant to mean that.
So I backed up and tried out the hypothesis that we're meant to conclude that in addition to the goal of enhancing citizen access through clearly-written documents, the Act has some other purposes as well. This seems more plausible, though somewhat weasel-worded. But after some preliminary definitions in Section 1, the law's "SEC. 2. PURPOSE." reads forthrightly, in its entirety:
The purpose of this Act is to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.
Those "other purposes" have disappeared from the section on "PURPOSE". Why were they in the preamble? No doubt some readers can enlighten us. Perhaps this is meant to protect the law against being thwarted by too-narrow construal of its purposes. Perhaps it's just a tradition of congressional drafting. In any case, it's puzzling to the lay reader, and not because of jargon or acronyms or a series of indirect references to clauses referencing other clauses.
1NC Rods From God
Space-based Rods from God are not feasible- our impacts occur before they can solve and ICBMs solve better.
Adams 4 (Eric, author for Popular Science. “Rods from God: Space-launched darts that strike like meteors” 6/1/2004 ps)
If so-called “Rods from God”—an informal nickname of untraceable origin—ever do materialize, it won’t be for at least 15 years. Launching heavy tungsten rods into space will require substantially cheaper rocket technology than we have today. But there are numerous other obstacles to making such a system work. Pike, of , argues that the rods’ speed would be so high that they would vaporize on impact, before the rods could penetrate the surface. Furthermore, the “absentee ratio”—the fact that orbiting satellites circle the Earth every 100 minutes and so at any given time might be far from the desired target—would be prohibitive. A better solution, Pike argues, is to pursue the original concept: Place the rods atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, which would slow down enough during the downward part of their trajectory to avoid vaporizing on impact. ICBMs would also be less expensive and, since they’re stationed on Earth, would take less time to reach their targets. “The space-basing people seem to understand the downside of space weapons,” Pike says—among them, high costs and the difficulty of maintaining weapon platforms in orbit. “But I’ll still bet you there’s a lot of classified work on this going on right now.”
The affirmative creates an image of a modern space-based gunboat diplomacy- “Rods from God” results in the devastation and destruction of earth.
Engelhardt 4. (Tom, editor of , co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's. “Twenty-first Century Gunboat Diplomacy.” March 31, 2004. ps)
Twenty-second Century Gunboat Diplomacy
At least as now imagined in the Pentagon, twenty-second century "gunboat diplomacy" will be conducted by what the Air Force's Space Command refers to as "space-based platforms" and the "cannons" will be a range of "exotic" weapons and delivery systems. In still unweaponized space (if you exclude the various spy satellites overhead), we plan for our future "ships" to travel the heavens alone, representatives of a singular heavenly version of gunboat diplomacy. Among the "five priorities for national security space efforts in 2004" set out by Peter B. Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the most striking, if also predictable, is that of "ensuring freedom of action in space" -- as in freedom of action for us, and no action at all for anyone else.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has long been riveted by the idea of dominating space, and in his hands space, a void, is now being re-imagined as the ocean of our imperial future, thanks to space weaponry now on the drawing boards like the nicknamed "Rods from God." These are to be "orbiting platforms stocked with tungsten rods perhaps 20 feet long and one foot in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on Earth within minutes. Accurate within about 25 feet, they would strike at speeds upwards of 12,000 feet per second, enough to destroy even hardened bunkers several stories underground."
Planning among "high frontier" enthusiasts for the conquest and militarization of space began in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, but it has now reached new levels of realism (of a mad sort). Theresa Hitchens of the Center for Defense Information recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle (Reining in our weaponry):
[T]he service's gloves came off with the Feb. 17 release of the new U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan. The document details a stunning array of exotic weapons to be pursued over the next decade: from an air-launched missile designed to knock satellites out of low orbit, to ground- and space-based lasers for attacking both missiles and satellites, to 'hypervelocity rod bundles' (nicknamed Rods from God)... Far from being aimed solely at the protection of U.S. space capabilities, such weapons are instead intended for offensive, first-strike missions.
Ever since H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898, we humans have been imagining scenarios in which implacable aliens with superweapons arrive from space to devastate our planet. But what if it turns out that the implacable aliens are actually us -- and that, as in the 16th century, someday in the not-too-distant future American "ships" will "burst from space" upon the "coasts" of our planet with devastation imprinted in their programs. These are, of course, the dreams of modern Mongols.
Notes
This PIC is probably going to need to be a functional PIC based off of cross-x against generic weaponization affs. It’s pretty doubtful that anyone will put the phrase “rods from god” in their plan text and if they do they deserve to lose.
If you want to make this a criticism of the word rods from god you need to make sure that if their plan text doesn’t say it, at least some of their evidence does or you can get them to in cross-x.
Replacement words if you make it a word PIC (if you make it a word PIC you’re not really going to be able to read some of these reasons why the actual program fails and stuff- it’s going to be just reasons saying “rods from god” is statist or sexist, rather than reasons the weapon itself is bad):
- “hyper velocity rod bundles”- officially this is what the Air Force has called them- “Rods from God” is a nickname- this is the best word to use for a replacement.
- “Project Thor” (that’s the name of the USAF program now- speaking from a mythological standpoint I don’t think you’ll have issues with referencing Thor the same way you would with someone like Ares- Thor is a pretty okay guy although he is also a god, so keep that in mind even though I don’t think referencing a mythological god of thunder probably links in the same way as saying that your weapons are “from” God.)
A2: Benign Heg Solves
The rhetoric of benign US dominance is a mask over the reality of the “Rods from God” program- the affirmative ultimately builds an arrogant American Empire which not only fails to protect its citizens from external threats and irregular warfare, but also creates a dangerous form of imperialism hiding behind the rhetoric of the benevolent hegemon.
Fritakis 4. (Bob, editor of the Free Press ( ), a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace. “Rods from Gods: The insanity of Star Wars.” Centre for Research on Globalisation [sic] 2 July 2004. ps)
Then Bush the Elder assumed the Presidency and ushered in the first Gulf War, and the military budget remained at Cold War levels. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Bill Clinton, a modest decrease in the defense budget placed it in the $270 billion range. Both Bush the Elder and Clinton allowed the Star Wars funding to lag. Now Bush the Younger has resurrected the dream of U.S. dominance of the Earth via the militarization of space.
According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, when the U.S. recently attacked Iraq, the Iraqi defense spending was $1 billion. The “axis of evil,” defined in President Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address to include North Korea and Iran in addition to Iraq, had an estimated defense spending totaling $7 billion at the time. While the official rhetoric of the Bush administration still attempts in the most cynical fashion to portray the U.S. military as a force for good in the world, this old school propaganda is crashing beneath the weight of a $400 billion defense budget, soon to be half a trillion dollars. Moreover, public records, government websites and popular magazines tell the world that our real objective is “full spectrum dominance” of the planet.
The June issue of Popular Science spells out the future of the U.S. military in a cover story entitled, “Is This What War Will Come To?” ( ) Not surprisingly, the cover includes the words “Defense 2020: The Pentagon’s Weapons of the Future.” This is a reference to the U.S. military’s directed energy program under the U.S. Space Command, known as “Joint Vision 2020.” (dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm ) This is where you’ll find the stated policy of the U.S. military -- “full spectrum dominance” of our planet.
“The projectile leaves the barrel at hypersonic velocity – Mach 7-plus – exits the Earth’s atmosphere, re-enters under satellite guidance and lands on the building less than six minutes later; its incredible velocity vaporizes the target with kinetic energy alone.”
Or, if you prefer, your tax dollars are building “a laser cannon that blasts from the air.” There’s also the phallic “Rods from Gods.” These are “space-launched darts that strike like meteors.” Paling in comparison is, “A gun that fires a million rounds a minute.” The casual and open nature of the reporting in Popular Science stands in sharp contrast to the network news that insists on parroting and giving credibility to the Bush propaganda that the U.S. is promoting peace. We’ve gone from Reagan’s slogan of “Peace through Strength” to the less subtle “America Uber Alles.”
Central Ohio, as usual, is involved in this military madness. Lieutenant Colonel JoAnn Erno, head of the power division at the Air Force Resource Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, is quoted on the development of “tactical lasers.”
But the Popular Science article is merely a part of a much greater military plan, which includes “using ‘weather as a force multiplier’” and controlling the weather for military purposes by the year 2025. (au.af.mil/au/2025/ ) In April 1997, President Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Cohen remarked at a terrorist conference at the University of Georgia, “Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”
How does Cohen know this, and why hasn’t the mainstream media seized upon the abundance of information in the public record regarding this terrorist threat?
Cohen knew it to be true because the so-called terrorists are emulating our own military tactics, they’re just doing it on the cheap a la ‘dirty bombs.” To expose these new unimaginably powerful weapons of mass destruction would indict the United States as a ruthless high-tech imperialist power.
At the crux of the U.S. directed energy program is the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) operating in Gakona, Alaska. (haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/ ) This ionosphere agitator is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. While the government officially denies its military application, Dr. Arnold Barnes of Phillips Lab lectured on the military applications of HAARP at the United States Army’s Developmental Test Command Symposium in 1997, where the good doctor also outlined the history of the U.S. military’s involvement in “weather modification.” (dtc.army.mil/tts/1997/proceed/abarnes/ )
But these Star Wars weapons of mass destruction will not make us safer. Just as in Iraq, people will develop the means for “irregular warfare” against an arrogant and superior military power, just as our founders did against the British. And if you don’t believe me, you might want to consult the September 2001 issue of Popular Mechanics that tells us how anti-U.S. terrorists can build “electromagnetic bombs” that “could throw civilization back 200 years.” The cost: “terrorists can build them for $400.” (science/military/2001/9/e-bomb/ )
The illusion that the U.S. is anything other than new Roman imperialism, a demented high-tech Christian crusade, or a budding Fourth Reich with better PR cannot be hidden from the reality of the massive U.S. military budget and its born-again Star Wars program.
A2: Prolif Turn
Status quo programs solve their prolif turn.
Goldfarb 5. (Michael, editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard. “The Rods from God: Are kinetic-energy weapons the future of space warfare?” June 8, 2005. ps)
Pike offered another interesting explanation for why the rods may remain on the drawing board--the GBU-28. The GBU-28 was designed to destroy underground bunkers, but there have been doubts about whether it can actually penetrate Iran's buried facilities. Pike says they would--"like a hot knife through butter"--and that this misperception may have been intentionally fostered: "to lull the mullahs into a false sense of security."
A2: Weaponization Inev
Even if weaponization is inevitable, rods from god is the wrong strategic choice- enemies adapt and they’re ineffective.
Goldfarb 5. (Michael, editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard. “The Rods from God: Are kinetic-energy weapons the future of space warfare?” June 8, 2005. ps)
Whether the Air Force does ultimately pursue this particular platform to fulfill its vision of American space superiority is a decision that should not be taken lightly. There are a great many obstacles to getting a tungsten rod into space and bringing it back down on the nuclear facilities or command centers of our enemies. Such obstacles range from our continued reliance on unreliable intelligence to the probability that our enemies would adapt to the new technology. Nevertheless, it's likely that space will be weaponized. The only question is whether the U.S. Air Force or the People's Liberation Army will be at the vanguard of the revolution.
A2: Just a Nickname
This doesn’t matter because either
a. They said the nickname, tagged their evidence with it, or wrote it in their plan text, or some such thing- triggers the link
b. we’re a PIC out of the program itself because the actual program is bad
c. even if it’s just a nickname it is the name most commonly used to refer to the policy and so shapes the way we understand and use it.
The aff’s goals of force projection through space would result in psychological devastation the likes of the attack on Hiroshima.
Garwin et al. 5. (IEEE Report. Bruce M. DeBlois is director of systems integration for BAE Systems, in Reston, Va. Richard L. Garwin (F), widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. R. Scott Kemp is a member of the research staff of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, in New Jersey. Jeremy C. Marwell is a Furman Scholar at the New York University School of Law, in New York City. This article is based on work the authors did while at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Star-Crossed: From orbiting lasers to metal rods that strike from the heavens, the potential to wage war from space raises startling possibilities and serious problems” March 2005. ps)
The last objective is perhaps the most alluring: the prompt and deadly projection of force anywhere on the globe. The psychological impact of such a blow might rival that of such devastating attacks as Hiroshima. But just as the unleashing of nuclear weapons had unforeseen consequences, so, too, would the weaponization of space. What's more, each of the leading proposed space weapons systems has significant physical limitations that make alternatives more effective and affordable by comparison.
2AC Rods from God
CP can’t solve- the mindset and rhetoric they criticize are literally Air Force doctrine.
Weiner 5. (Tim, reporter for the New York Times. “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs.” May 18, 2005. ps)
The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.
The mission will require new weapons, new space satellites, new ways of doing battle and, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. It faces enormous technological obstacles. And many of the nation's allies object to the idea that space is an American frontier.
Yet "there seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of the Air Force" and its plans for the future, Capt. David C. Hardesty of the Naval War College faculty says in a new study.
The Air Force sees space supremacy as its destiny- CP cannot solve.
Weiner 5. (Tim, reporter for the New York Times. “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs.” May 18, 2005. ps)
But General Lord said such problems should not stand in the way of the Air Force's plans to move into space.
"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny," he told an Air Force conference in September. "Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
Turn: Rods from god maintains the effectiveness of the NPT- non-nuclear deterrent is key to solve rouge state prolif.
Goldfarb 5. (Michael, editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard. “The Rods from God: Are kinetic-energy weapons the future of space warfare?” June 8, 2005. ps)
Among the weapons the Air Force might deploy are space-based lasers, a space plane capable of delivering a half-ton payload anywhere in the world in 45 minutes, and the "rods from god." The rods are currently just a concept--and have been since the early 1980s--but, if the myriad technical and political hurdles to deployment could be overcome, the system could represent a tremendous leap forward in the military's ability to destroy underground, hardened facilities of the type that have allowed Iran and other rogue states to violate the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty with impunity.
How do the rods work? The system would likely be comprised of tandem satellites, one serving as a communications platform, the other carrying an indeterminate number of tungsten rods, each up to 20 feet in length and 1 foot in diameter. These rods, which could be dropped on a target with as little as 15 minutes notice, would enter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 36,000 feet per second--about as fast as a meteor. Upon impact, the rod would be capable of producing all the effects of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, without any of the radioactive fallout. This type of weapon relies on kinetic energy, rather than high-explosives, to generate destructive force (as do smart spears, another weapon system which would rely on tungsten rods, though not space-based).
Clearly the rods are a first-strike, offensive weapon. The nation's aging fleet of ICBMs, and its more modern Ohio-class submarines--each carrying 24 Trident missiles--will serve as an adequate nuclear deterrent well into the 21st century, but nuclear weapons cannot deter rogue states from developing their own nuclear arsenals.
Iran has used deeply buried facilities, such as the one in Natanz, to shelter its nuclear program from an assault similar to Israel's raid on Iraq's Osirak facilities. This has limited America's options for intervention. A conventional attack on such facilities might succeed in setting the Iranian program back a few years, but due to the presumed dispersal of equipment over a number of sites across the Islamic Republic, only good intelligence and a great deal of luck would eliminate the threat entirely. And while a nuclear attack could be tactically successful, it is politically unviable. A few well-placed tungsten rods, however, would guarantee the destruction of the targeted facilities (assuming timely and accurate intelligence).
Of course the rods would not be a panacea for proliferation. It is hard to imagine how the "rods from god" would alter the equation in North Korea, which possesses thousands of rockets and artillery pieces capable of hitting Seoul in retaliation for any perceived act of aggression by the United States. But no other rogue state can hold a gun to the head of the international community the way North Korea can. Absent such a non-nuclear deterrent, rogue states such as modern-day Iran and Saddam-era Iraq have employed hardened, underground bunkers (note the recent discovery of a large, underground insurgent lair in Anbar) as their primary defense against American air superiority.
Rods from God are inevitable- pervasive in the lit and if they aren’t space-based, the Air Force develops an ICBM-based version.
Adams 4 (Eric, author for Popular Science. “Rods from God: Space-launched darts that strike like meteors” 6/1/2004 ps)
The concept of kinetic-energy weapons has been around ever since the RAND Corporation proposed placing rods on the tips of ICBMs in the 1950s; the satellite twist was popularized by sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle. Though the Pentagon won’t say how far along the research is, or even confirm that any efforts are underway, the concept persists. The “U.S. Air Force Transformation Flight Plan,” published by the Air Force in November 2003, references “hypervelocity rod bundles” in its outline of future space-based weapons, and in 2002, another report from RAND, “Space Weapons, Earth Wars,” dedicated entire sections to the technology’s usefulness.
ICBM mounting means rods from god causes misperception of nuclear first strike.
Goldfarb 5. (Michael, editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard. “The Rods from God: Are kinetic-energy weapons the future of space warfare?” June 8, 2005. ps)
Furthermore, it may be necessary to slow substantially the rods' rate of speed to prevent them from vaporizing on impact--though retrorockets might offer a solution to this problem. Simply attaching a tungsten rod to the tip of an ICBM would overcome many of these hurdles, but would create another serious problem: the need to involve the Russians and Chinese, who might detect such a launch and mistake it for an American nuclear attack on their own territories.
Kinetic-energy rods are key to effective and stable defense systems. Terrestrial defenses are more likely to be destabilizing.
RAND 2. (RAND’s Project Air Force research, conducted by Bob Preston, Dana J. Johnson, Sean Edwards, Michael Miller, Calvin Shipbaugh. 2002. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. “Space Weapons, Earth Wars.” Pg 35-36. ps)
A space-based laser constellation should therefore be augmented by weapons and tactics that blunt the opponent’s opportunity to saturate or that bring additional resources to bear in response to such an attempt. It will not be reasonable to concentrate directed-energy weapons in orbit. It may be reasonable to augment them with terrestrial and atmospheric platforms, if such platforms can be in place in time. It will certainly help to add layers, such as the kinetic-energy interceptors discussed in the next section and conventional surfacebased interceptors, to concentrate on the leakage through the static defense. Taking advantage of the longer time it takes missiles to be assembled and prepared for a salvo would allow taking the fight to the opponent to reduce his ability to mount a concentrated attack— if weapon design (wavelength selection) and weather permit. Missiles prepositioned in hardened silos or bunkers would be attacked using kinetic-energy rods or conventional weapons, as we will discuss in later sections of this chapter.
Some degree of reserve capacity might be useful for a directed energy weapon constellation—if the excess can be applied against useful targets. For example, the reserve capacity could be available for taking the fight to the opponent, against the targets and at the times one chooses. Focusing on only the most urgent mission—for example, by selecting a wavelength that does not propagate to potential targets of interest or by overoptimizing weapon and orbit selections—could easily cause one to miss the opportunity to concentrate such a reserve.
For some problems, the static limitations of such a constellation may be desirable, possibly essential. There is, however, such a thing as too much defense. In the current context, the issue is national missile defense against a limited threat—accidental or rogue nation launch—since mutual deterrence of nuclear war is already in place among peers. To avoid destabilizing deterrence among peers, the defense must not be too capable (Wilkening, 2000). Whereas deployable terrestrial defenses may be ambiguous in their application to theater defenses and national defense, a space-based directed energy defense would be observably limited.
AFF A2 Rods from God PIC
Notes
First and foremost, my best advice for the aff is just not to defend Rods from God. As in: a) Don’t ever put that in your plan text, and b) if they ask in CX say your aff doesn’t include it.
Because they are kind of actually bad. Not only for the K reasons in this PIC, but also because they can be mistaken for nukes and stuff and that’s probably bad because people respond and at that point we might as well just have put nukes in space to save ourselves all this trouble. But if somehow they do get you into this mess…
1NC Space Telescopes
NOTE: this one is not a word pic, but accesses the frontier arguments from exploration
Telescope images serve as a mural of the next frontier, legitimizing frontier rhetoric.
Fernau 9. (Fletcher, research coordinator at the JJP VA Center. Former administrative support at American University, advised by Dr. Peter Howard, adjunct Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service at American University. “Putting U.S. Space Policy in Context: How Have Policymakers Drawn on Existing Rhetorical Commonplaces to Legitimate U.S. Space Policy?” . Capstone Project for Honors in International Studies, May, 2009. ps)
Hubble does not only provide scientific benefits, it allows public engagement. In many ways Hubble images serve the same role as the panoramic murals of western scenery that used to adorn eastern train stations, commissioned by railroads to entice settlers westward. Hubble demonstrates that when the identity myth inherent in the frontier can successfully be integrated with tangible results, the frontier as a legitimating rhetorical commonplace still has force. The telescope shows that the power of space as a frontier in the public consciousness still remains, even if the means to get there are as yet out of reach.
This situation underlines the relevance of constructivism as a useful lens for understanding space policy debates. It is clear that conflict over space policy today is a rhetorical battle, not a question of technological capability. Postmodern skepticism of American exceptionalism coupled with the failure of successive American leaders to convincingly maintain the space-as-frontier compound commonplace, even if they occasionally tried to use its language, explains the stagnation of further ambitious space policy initiatives and reveals the historical contingency of space policy discourse.
*DISCURSIVE FRAMEWORK
Discourse First
The words we choose and the discourse we employ shapes politics- words define what political responses are employed
Doremus 2K Professor of Law, University of California at Davis (Winter 2000, Holly, Washington & Lee Law Review, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a New Discourse”, Vol 57 Issue 1, Lexis, SW)
Rhetoric matters. That is almost too basic to be worth saying, but it bears repeating because sometimes the rhetoric we use to describe problems becomes so ingrained as to be almost invisible. Even if we are unaware of it, though, rhetoric has the very real effect of severely constraining our perception of a problem and its potential solutions. Terminology is one aspect of rhetoric. The words we use to describe the world around us condition our response to that world. Whether we use the word "swamps" or "wetlands," for example, may determine whether we drain or protect those areas. n1 Not surprisingly, the battle to control terminology is an important one in the environmental context. n2 But there is far more to the rhetoric of law. The way words are put together to form stories and discourses shapes the law and society. Stories, which put a human face on [*13] concerns that might otherwise go unnoticed, exert a powerful emotional tug. n3 "Discourses," loose collections of concepts and ideas, provide a shared language for envisioning problems and solutions. n4 This Article focuses on the use of rhetoric in political battles over the extent to which law should protect nature against human encroachment. At some level, all rhetoric in a democratic society can be tied to the political process; any statement that any member of the political community encounters may influence his or her views, votes, financial contributions, or other political activities. But some communications are more likely than others to affect political outcomes or to play a privileged role in the implementation and interpretation of law. The discussion that follows concentrates on such "political rhetoric," including communications directed to legislatures, agencies, or voters with the intention of influencing the outcome of political decisions; n5 statements made by legislators or agency personnel to explain or justify their decisions; and legislative, administrative, and judicial actions.
Language shape policy – it frames the way issues are perceived
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
In conclusion, the development of a 'mindset' of bureaucratese brought on by the misuse of language and a 'vocabulary of thought' based on deception, misinformation, and impersonal communications must be avoided. The language of bureaucrats does not simply depict issues, but it constructs them. Language shapes public policy. It frames the nature of public debates and the way the public, other bureaucrats, and politicians perceive the issues. Moreover, public access to government services is contingent on clear communication. The adoption of plain English in public communication is necessary. Problem solution, after all, depends on problem construction.
Rhetoric shapes policy implementation
Doremus 2K Professor of Law, University of California at Davis (Winter 2000, Holly, Washington & Lee Law Review, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a New Discourse”, Vol 57 Issue 1, Lexis, SW)
Perhaps in some circumstances such manipulation can be effective, and political rhetoric can be used to hide the true basis of a political decision that achieves quite different ends. But in the context of nature protection, that strategy is demonstrably ineffective. The laws that have been enacted to protect nature respond directly to the political stories used to argue for their passage. In other words, they are aimed at the problems those stories describe. As a result they are not likely, as I explain in Part IV, to solve the fundamental problem of nature protection in the modern world. Nor does the political rhetoric become irrelevant once a law or regulation is in place; that rhetoric necessarily forms the background against which the law or regulation is interpreted. Finally, political rhetoric cannot change cultural attitudes without directly addressing the second-order problem.
Rhetoric affects our response to problems
Luke 99 Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic University, also serves as a member of the editorial board of Organization & Environment, New Political Science, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Telos, International Political Economy Yearbook, and Post-Communist Cultural Studies with Penn State University Press (June 4-6 1999, Timothy, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment,
“Ecocritique in Context: Technology, Democracy and Capitalism as Environment”, SW)
Many of the most important political debates in this generation center upon working through the practical implications in a handful of discursive dualisms: Nature/Society, Ecology/Economy, Environment/Organism. With each couplet, on-going arguments contest the terms themselves: where one stops and the other starts, how the first limits the second, why each cannot exist without the other, what directives in the first guide the second, when the latter endangers the former are all questions sustaining innumerable intellectual exchanges. Because very little here is obvious as such, these terms are invested with new significance by every individual or group that deploys them as meaningful constructs in environmental analysis. The result of so much pushing and pulling against the values and practices implied by these discursive oppositions is a vast body of ecocriticism. Responding to the implications of these evergreen dualisms, in turn, produces many variants of "ecocritique," which articulate their visions of right conduct for individuals, how communities might safeguard their environments or why progress never comes to pass.
In this context, many ecocritiques remain stuck in modernist ruts, assuming an operational terrain in which humans intervene in their natural environments in ways—either intended or unanticipated—that turn out to be disastrous. Thus, technology, democracy, and capitalism are cast as anthropogenic forces that impinge, with deleterious effects, on the Earth’s theogenic, or, at least, autogenic environments. Whether they are nature laments or anti-industrial polemics, ecocritiques rarely reposition their analyses outside of modernity's constantly changing contexts. Why not reverse some of these rhetorical relations? Perhaps technology, democracy, and capitalism are now coevolving into forces that have many effects, some positive and some negative, including the fabrication of enduring anthropogenic environments. Instead of being seen as factors intruding upon the environment, their joint interaction effects can be seen as an environment in itself. If technology, democracy, and capitalism are recast as part and parcel of our environment, then their influence could be much greater and far different than what is attributed to them by other styles of ecocritique.
AT: reps don’t influence thought
Words invoke specific representations – each word denotes a particular worldview
Mphande, 05 Lecturer in International Community Development at the University of Victoria (15 -18 November 2005, Charles, International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory into Research, “Encumbering Development: Development Discourse as Hegemonic Resources in the Developing World”, SW)
Drawing on Fairclough (1992, 2003), the analysis of formal linguistic features, which provide for linguistic realisations of discourses in genres, examines texts on two levels. One level is identifying and characterising the discourses in question. On this level, the analysis distinguishes how vocabulary ‘lexicalises’ the world in particular ways. This analysis involves examining how lexical semantic relationships are deployed in different discourses to structure the world differently. This step is especially rewarding when conflicting discourses are being examined, as
What is centrally contested is the power of...preconstructed semantic systems to generate particular visions of the world which may have the performative power to sustain or remake the world in their image (Fairclough 2003:130).
The analysis also involves distinguishing discourses by the way they employ lexical and grammatical metaphor - noun-like entities (nominalisations) to represent processes as ‘things’ or entities, or process nouns (nouns with the verb-like quality of representing processes and relations). As for the importance of metaphor as a discursive resource, Fairclough (2003:131-132) notes “metaphor is one resource available for producing distinct representations of the world. But it is perhaps the particular combination of different metaphors which differentiates discourses.” Another important point of analysis in relation to discourses is that a particular discourse (or repertoire) “can...generate many specific representations” (Fairclough 2003:124). This calls for observations of levels of abstraction that discourses or repertoires have in terms of degree of repetition, commonality, stability over time and scale (how much of the world they include, and therefore the range of representations they can generate). Another feature of analysis on this level is the determination of underlying assumptions (Fairclough’s rendering of presuppositions) as varieties of implicitness, that include also logical implications, standard conversational implicatures, and non- standard conversational implicatures and intertextuality as parallel features (two sides of one issue) in their connections to other texts. According to Fairclough (2003:41), intertextuality “accentuates...dialogue between the voice of the author of a text and other voices” whereas assumptions “diminish...[dialogicality].” The importance of issues of assumptions and intertexuality is that they open up examination of what a text includes and excludes.
AT: don’t evaluate ANY reps
Discourse creates the conditions of possibility – they ignore the textual dimension of policy process
Mphande, 05 Lecturer in International Community Development at the University of Victoria (15 -18 November 2005, Charles, International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory into Research, “Encumbering Development: Development Discourse as Hegemonic Resources in the Developing World”, SW)
The theoretical framework of the analysis in this paper draws mainly from the discourse analytic perspectives that embrace a social constructionist epistemology (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Fairclough 1992; Potter 1996; Potter and Wetherell 1987; Gergen 1994; Gergen 2001). While text analysis is based on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough 1989, 1992), I also draw on Discursive Psychology (DASP) as practiced by Potter and Wetherell (1987) as it “provides particularly useful and widely used tools for research in communication, culture and language” (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002:106). In this analysis DASP is particularly useful for rhetorical analysis, which complements CDA’s analysis of formal linguistic features, using its three-dimensional analytical framework (Fairclough 1992, 1995). On a practical level, Fairclough (1992:71) explains that “discursive practice is manifested in linguistic form...as ‘texts’, using ‘text’ in Halliday’s broad sense.” He goes on to assert that “’Discursive practice’ does...not contrast with social practice: the former is a particular form of the latter” (p71). In view of the object of analysis, representations of development and contextual social practices that have been associated with development work in Malawi as they appeared in print media sources, radio or policy submission texts, interplay or dynamics of discourses are a feature that is of interest in this analysis. Fairclough (2003:124) posits that: The relationships between different discourses are one element of the relationships between different people – they may complement one another, compete with one another, one can dominate others, and so forth. Discourses constitute part of the resources which people deploy in relating to one another – keeping separate from one another, cooperating, competing, dominating – and in seeking to change the ways in which they relate to one another. Thus, on an analytical level, the analysis elevates the concept of Orders of Discourse (whose elements include genres, styles, discourses) (Fairclough 1992, 1995) to the main pillar of the discursive/social practice analyses. As a concept, order of discourse has analytical advantage in empirical research in that it provides the researcher a tool to examine how discourses, by representing reality in one particular way rather than in other possible ways, constitute subjects and objects in particular ways, create boundaries between the true and the false, and make certain types of action relevant and others unthinkable (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002:145).
Both, CDA and DASP are agreed that discursive accounts of reality have social consequences. In this analysis, the interest is in what social consequences various representations of development have had, and also what consequences would be noticed if one understanding instead of the other were accepted. Fairclough (2003:124) aptly extends this thought: “Discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather is seen to be), they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions.” This points to the interplay of discourses and their social consequences.
Ignoring reps replicates errors and fails – Anthropology proves
Gow 96 Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University (July 1996, David D., Anthropological Quarterly, “Review: The Anthropology of Development: Discourse, Agency, and Culture”, Vol. 69, No. 3, JSTOR, SW)
The second major shortcoming concerns the
relationship to academic anthropology, particularly the theoretical and methodological issues that have
occupied the discipline over the past decade.2 De- velopment anthropology has studiously ignored the postmodern critique of academic anthropology, particularly those areas of direct relevance to its own practice, namely the writing of texts (in this case developmental rather than ethnographic), the question of representation, and the establishment of "developmental" authority.3 Underlying much of the writing in development anthropology is a commonsense view of language which holds that our experience of the world, and by association of development, is not affected by the form and content of language--"language is viewed as a neutral tool for thought" (Jordan 1991). Such a simple-minded faith in the neutrality of language, particularly in its written form, has meant that development anthropology has tended to ignore the relationship between language and power and take at face value much of the official development literature. In the same way, it has accepted at face value the "scientific" basis of development discourse and develop- ment research, with the implied assumption that there is order in the social world, that social life is patterned, and that the objective of planning should be to predict and control (Nielsen 1990).
1NC Rhetoric Framework
Our framework is that language used in this debate matters more than any meaning contained within that language. Their violent language and metaphors create a culture of violence and must be rejected
Ralph Summy is the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawaii. He formerly headed the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Australia. ”Nonviolent Speech” Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
Instead of, for instance, "shooting holes in an argument," its weakness could be equated to "unraveling a ball of yarn." A soccer "shoot-out" could appropriately be called a "boot-out." The violent phrase, "to kill two birds with one stone" could be replaced by the equally effective but pacific aphorism, "to stroke two birds with one hand." Rather than refer to "a double-edged sword," the same meaning could be conveyed by the phrase "two sides to the coin." Lovers no longer need "dress to kill," which is surely not what is literally intended anyway, so why not make the more poignant observation that they "dress to thrill." If the aim is to eliminate violence from sex play, that also entails removing it from the language. No matter how harmless some violent phrases might superficially appear, they reflect the way we perceive the world and reinforce behavioral patterns already excessively violent in a country like the United States. Converting one's language to nonviolence is something that everyone can do. It does not require the organization of a social movement or the support of a political party but can be initiated by any concerned individual. It can be undertaken as soon as an alternative vocabulary is developed--that is, immediately. While it would be appropriate to link any such activity to the United Nations' Culture of Peace Declaration for the Year 2000, there is no reason to wait another year or so before people launch their own private campaigns. In my own peace studies courses students are constantly challenged to replace violent expressions with apposite nonviolent ones. Some of the alternative sayings they have constructed have not only been excellent "attention-getters," they have been able to merge easily into the discourse of ordinary, everyday speech. When practiced on people outside the classroom, the effect has proved quite extraordinary. Not only does it reduce the use of violent language but it arrests people's attention and paves the way for discussion on a range of peace topics. Despite an absence of empirical verification, it is not difficult to understand the attraction that lies behind the use of violent language, especially when it takes the form of a striking metaphor. We want to express ourselves in the most dynamic anti forceful manner possible--a factor that brings into play at the subconscious level our concept of power. Power is generally viewed as the mobilization of human and material resources in order that a person or a group of people can exercise control over others, and thereby prevail in any conflict affecting wants or interests. It is assumed that behind every conflict ultimately resides the question of "power over" or who will be the dominator. Although win-win approaches can be found for resolving a conflict, it is uncritically accepted that the most effective way, when every other means has been exhausted, is to resort to a power-based or win-lose approach. the ultimate sanction in any conflict situation is to possess superior resources of power which will be manifested in violence or the threat of violence, and this will bend the opponent to one's will.
Their language can’t be understood as neutral. They chose the words that they spoke, willingly participating in a cultural construction of violent apparatuses that spill over outside the academy, culminating in extinction
Ralph Summy is the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawaii. He formerly headed the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Australia. ”Nonviolent Speech” Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
A second major reason for people's ready acceptance of violent expressions--which coincides with their endorsement of the "power over" concept--can be traced to the generalized belief that beneath the veneer of civil and ordered human relations Homo sapiens is an innately violent creature, and society is constantly on the threshold of chaos. William Golding's novel, The Lord of the Flies, admirably reflects this view. From the same premise the Florentine politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, a diplomat and adviser to 16th-century Renaissance rulers, drew the conclusion that "the main foundations of every state ... are good laws and good arms." Power and violence from above were the sine qua non of a prosperous and secure state. "That is why," he noted, "all armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief." A century later, Thomas Hobbes spelled out the natural condition of human beings in the bleakest of terms. For him the "life of man [sic] is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The world amounted to a "bellum omnium contra omnes [a war of all against each]," so that a strong ruler was required to contain the base and venal drives of the human animal, thereby ensuring not only a modicum of prosperity for the society but preventing its demise. Hobbes' model society of authority was the brutal Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell; in Machiavelli's case it was the city state of the Prince who did not shrink from exercising cruelty, if need be, as long as it was "used well ... employed once and for all." While the smart Prince would prefer to dominate through the wiles of a fox, he should not hesitate to kill like the lion when the tamer methods failed. The influential 20th-century political scientist and doyen of the international relations school of realism, Hans Morgenthau, expressed this same general premise in terms of a universal human "drive to live, propagate, and dominate." Despite the extremely problematic nature of the "drive to ... dominate" that is supposedly "common to all men [sic]," it is this delimiting construct for creating world peace that has plagued the thinking of policymakers in the second half of the 20th century. Only in recent years has a concerted body of scholarship evolved to challenge the thesis of the human species being innately driven to exercise "power over" through intra-species violence. This critique culminated in the unequivocal Seville Statement of 1986, signed by a long list of prominent natural and behavioral scientists. Indeed, they argue, strong evidence exists to suggest that human beings have an equal, if not greater, propensity for nonviolence than violence. The challenge is for human beings to assume the initiative and condition their behavior through cultural, institutional and policy changes, so that life in the next millennium will not be threatened with what Jonathan Schell has called "the death of death itself." It may only be a small step for survival and life when choosing to undercut the linguistic violence reified in the world of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Morgenthau, but such a step is critical on the long road to building a durable peace.
Vote Negative
Challenging single instances of violent language is key to resisting oppression by elites
Ralph Summy is the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawaii. He formerly headed the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Queensland, Australia. ”Nonviolent Speech” Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
By accepting the introduction of violence into the language, people are contributing to the affirmation of a paradigm that condemns them to the ranks of the dominated and the world at large to a political system of circulating elites and perpetual violence. Thus any action, no matter how small, that can counter the legitimization of violence in all its multifaceted forms will be undermining the foundations of elite domination. Conversely, if the elites can successfully promote the acceptance of legitimate violence, mainly through their control of the institutions of education and communication, their position is assured. Not surprisingly, their focus is thus not directed at reducing the cultural violence of language and media--a violence that rationalizes and helps to sustain the dominant paradigm--but is primarily confined to decreasing the overt violence that can destabilize their position. The relationship between a cultural phenomenon like language and a concrete phenomenon like behavior has been studied at great length. The research overwhelmingly points to the fact that the way in which we express ourselves directs as well as reflects our perceptions, which in turn relate to our actions. If we communicate with violent language, it tells us something about the values and processes we respect; it also reinforces an outlook rooted in violence which informs us how to behave and how we can expect others to behave. Moreover, how we communicate impinges on the way others are forced to formulated their thinking and behavior in response. As explained by R. S. Ross, "communication is a process involving a sorting, selecting and sending of symbols in such a way as to help a listener find in his or her own mind a meaning or response similar to that intended by the communicator." While we may not intend for our symbolic language to be taken literally, a violent metaphor may be unintentionally interpreted by the receiver in a literal sense. Even if the symbolic message is conveyed to the listener as it was intended, a violent metaphor has still prescribed the lens through which it must be interpreted, and therefore has helped to perpetuate an output of subconscious violent thinking.
Tolerance is an unacceptable approach to violent language- it solves nothing while allowing the violent rhetoric to continue
Andrew Kelley lives in Denton, Texas, and teaches philosophy at Texas Woman's University, ON LISTENING , By: Kelley, Andrew, Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
The alternative, tolerance, does not necessarily fare much better. Tolerance occurs when one party allows certain acts or uses of language to take place, whether or not the party happens to agree with, respect, or condone them. For society to function, certain types of written or spoken language cannot be tolerated: out and out lies that harm a person's reputation, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and the like. But as with censorship, this goes beyond the debate about freedoms and fights. Tolerance does not necessarily promote harmony or connections between people. I can tolerate what my neighbor says and does while at the same time hate her and have no desire to connect or to live in harmony with her.
2NC Rhetoric Framework
1. Our interpretation is that you only look at the language, treat the 1ac as a speech act and evaluate it’s competition with speech act that occurred during the time allocated to the criticism
a. Education- Language determines the way we think about things- ignoring violent language allows our minds to be accustomed to certain discourses which unconsciously affect the way we act- this means that a debate with violent language cannot have any educational merit since we are only deluding ourselves about what actions actually cause what results
b. Fairness- our Summy evidence indicates that violent language snowballs into uses which make people profoundly uncomfortable, thus there can be no fair debate that contains violent language since certain participants may not be able to focus on the arguments as they recall their own experiences- we are not saying that their affirmative explicitly causes this but rather that a vote affirmative legitimizes such future violent actions
c. Argumentative responsibility- they named their advantages, they could have chosen a non-violent metaphor but they didn’t, the fact that they included it as part of their rhetorical justification for their affirmative as a whole means that voting negative is able to challenge that use- as part of their 1ac they should be bound to defend it
2. Plan focus is bad:
a. Arbitrary- we’ll counter-interpret with they only get to advocate the rhetoric of their advantage titles, it’s equally as arbitrary as only defending the plan
b. Moots 90% of the 1ac- they say they should only be responsible for 10 seconds of the 1ac while we say they should be responsible for all of it, it is very clear who moots more
3. We’ll answer their infinite regression arguments here:
a. Inevitable- regression happens everywhere from T debates over counter-interpretations to debates about how the plan is put into effect, argumably it is inherent in the very nature of fiat
b. Literature checks- it’s not like we’re carrying a K of the word “if” in our tubs, there are only so many phrases the academy finds time to criticize
c. Pre-round research checks- they should know the reasons they are using certain phrases over others rather than just blindly reading, if our K makes them think more about how they speak then that’s a net good
d. Counter-interpretation: they only have to defend the plan text and advantage titles, at very least they get to choose the rhetoric that goes into those and they frame the rest of the debate
4. Their interpretation is not competitive with our interpretation: We’ll permute to say that you look at the policy implications of the plan BUT they have to defend the language of the 1ac is used in the policy implementation
a. Ground- This is the only interpretation that doesn’t moot out the 90% of the 1ac that wasn’t the plan text and thus is better for both aff and neg ground
b. Predictability-Prevents them from arbitrarily choosing which parts of the 1ac they defend, they should be stuck with all of it
c. It solves all their offense because they get to way their advantage claim but we get to weigh the impact of the language they’ve used to frame it. This facilitates the best clash and comparative argumentation
d. If we win this interpretation, you vote negative
Ruben G. Apressyan is Chair of the Department of Ethics at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow; Director of the Research and Education Center for the Ethics of Nonviolence; and Professor of Moral Philosophy at Moscow Lomonosov State University VIOLENT SPEECH , By: Apressyan, Ruben G., Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
In this respect, language is a means for the powerful alteration of reality. This is possible because language is creative. Language is brought forth by life. But in common use it separates from life and starts, in turn, creating life. The content of words filled with thoughts is different from the reality that brought them forth. Both thoughts and words set out peculiar realms. The reality reflects the speech. These philosophical statements are converted to tools of political language making: through renewal of language politicians alter the reality. "New-speech" is obligatory. Nevertheless, the invasion of power into the sphere of language, ideology and propaganda rarely occurs in direct and immediate forms; the language of power is always equipped with the structures of mediation, interpretation and transformation that turn everything upside down. The thesis that what is not in language doesn't exist in reality is a core principle of language-making in politics. Meanwhile, this theoretical statement becomes a significant instrument in political language making: Politicians purposefully influence the language to change reality.
AT: Trivializes Real-World Violence
1. No link- we don’t say that real-world violence is less important just that we should deal with rhetorical problems as well
2. Extend Summy- rhetorical violence leads to real-world violence which means that you de facto HAVE to address one in order to address the other
3. While their argument may be globally true, in the context of a debate where we are employing rhetorical devices, there may be compelling reasons why violent language should be rejected as a priori, namely that it shapes the way we think about the world and thus has a greater effect on us as individuals then discussions of real-world violence
4. They can’t draw a distinction between the two- rhetorical violence IS physical violence
Ellen W. Gorsevski is a doctoral candidate at the Pennsylvania State University, Department of Speech Communication THE PHYSICAL SIDE OF LINGUISTIC VIOLENCE , By: Gorsevski, Ellen W., Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
Another context in which linguistic violence has been shown to have very real physical effects is that of conflicts in married couples. John Gottman studied the physiological impacts of negative conflict exchanges between marital partners, finding that the exchange of highly negative words (linguistically conveyed violence) and facial expressions (nonverbally communicated violence) that convey disgust, contempt, or other negative messages results in bodily or physiological responses. These very physical responses include "a reduced ability to process new information, a reliance on ... [redundant and unhelpful] behaviors and cognitions, and a tendency to invoke fight and flight behaviors" such as increased aggression. As in the studies in hate crimes cited above, Gottman likewise found that as much as four years after the divorce, participants in highly negative marital conflicts became physically ill, in addition to suffering from psychological ailments such as depression. Gottman actually measured, in vitro and in vivo, the immune functions in the blood of people participating in negative conflicts (involving only verbal, gesticulatory, and facial expressions in communicative exchange), and found that the ability of the blood cells to function in warding off viruses was markedly reduced from that measured prior to the negative conflictual exchange. The levels of adrenaline, particularly in men, rose markedly and remained at high levels for longer. In addition, there were increases in heart rate, as well as sustained feelings of anger. All of these have been found to inhibit the body's ability to prevent and heal illness. As a result of repeated bodily stresses arising from such negative communicative exchanges, people become sad or ill or both. Gottman posits that heart disease "is related to chronic life situations that generate blends or temporal sequences of... states [of] anger, hostility ... sadness, depression, and helplessness." Such research confirms that linguistic violence in the form of hurtful words, facial grimaces, or gestures can produce real and measurable physical effects on those involved. Taking a verbal beating means taking a kind of corporeal beating as well.
5. We’ll re-raise: This attempt to draw lines between legitimate and illegitimate violence is what allows the propagation of violent structures of authority
Ruben G. Apressyan is Chair of the Department of Ethics at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow; Director of the Research and Education Center for the Ethics of Nonviolence; and Professor of Moral Philosophy at Moscow Lomonosov State University VIOLENT SPEECH , By: Apressyan, Ruben G., Peace Review, 10402659, Dec98, Vol. 10, Issue 4
Political control and pressure is often defined as a sphere of legitimate violence. There are great differences between legitimate and illegitimate violence. In the first case, violence appears as a means of politics. In the second, as its source and basic foundation. In the former case power uses violence; in the latter, violence becomes power. Language is used by violent power as one of its means. Linguistic violence is manifested in sowing dissent, in seduction and all the ways of deriving advantage from one's own linguistic superiority over those who have less linguistic power. Power practices violence in various ways. The linguistic violence executed by power is particularly dangerous and is manifested in purposeful confusion and temptation based on supremacy and predominance. Linguistic violence by the authorities mediates political violence and is supported by the authority of the state. Such language not only corrupts at the level of state and political institutions but also distorts at the level of private relations. According to Paul Ricoeur, distortion of language at a state level and at the level of political institutions leads to a distortion of private relations as well. In its functional aspect, the linguistic violence exercised by authorities is a means of political violence and is fortified by the authority of state power and the persons associated with it. Any power represents hierarchy, or verticality, in human relations. It means that some people make decisions upon certain questions, within certain limits, under certain circumstances, instead of others. However, power may have different foundations. It may be founded on an actual difference of wills (like the power of parents over children). It may be founded on a constitutive contract, an agreement of those who are the subject of power (like judicial power). Or, power may be founded on external compulsion. In concordance with external compulsion, power appears as violence. These three different foundations of power have no absolute boundaries. They may be whimsically combined in real social and political experience. One particularly typical and insidious combination is when violence presents itself in the language of laws and administrative regulations, or power contract. In this combination, language plays a crucial role. Speaking about political speech one may assume that the character of its violence and the measure of its aggression depend upon the type of language used. It is apparent, that the state authorities are familiar with the language of power contracts. The language of this type of power appears as the language of a bargain or a social contract. On the other hand, paternalist power gravitates towards the language of exhortation and invective and thus confirms itself as a power of arbitrary care or, what is almost the same, outrage manifested beyond the law and social contract.
Rhetorical Conditionality 2NC
1. Here’s our interpretation of rhetorical conditionality- the affirmative must defend the entirety of their 1ac speech act and their advocacy, the negative must defend the rhetoric within the speech time allotted towards furthering the cause of a single position or strategic set of positions
2. This interpretation is good for several reasons:
a. Reciprocity- the affirmative’s speech act is delivered in support of their policy options, thus they should be forced to defend all their rhetoric. A negative which tests the plan through multiple positions should be able to defend that rhetoric in isolation because they are in furtherance of fundamentally different things.
b. Real-World- people often are forced to defend their positions from the angles of different groups which don’t agree except on the warrants, only the claim, this form of argument is the best preparation
c. Education- this allows people to learn about different aspects of their advocacy and the rhetoric they use to justify it, while any other interpretation would mandate that we either read one off or not read this argument at all
d. Strategy- our juxtaposition forces strategic 2ac time allocation and for them to make smarter arguments which in turn leads to an all-around better debate and promotes better strategic thinking
e. Thinking on Your Feet- the more we skew your time the smarter you have to think which means that any risk of these arguments default negative
f. Our argument is good for debate- that will be impacted on the framework flow
3. Even if we lose this argument we can still win on the K
a. Specificity- our links are all specific to violent metaphors, even if they think our language is violent it is there burden to point out where we use a metaphor and to prove why it’s violent
b. Justification- we do not employ the metaphor of the loaded gun which we have a specific d/a to, which means that the alternative will always be net-beneficial over the permutation
4. Now here’s our defense:
a. Timeskew is inevitable- there are faster and slower teams, teams that read more or less cards or make more concise arguments
b. Multiple worlds are inevitable- different case arguments, disadvantages, topicality arguments means they’ll always have to switch gears
c. Contradictions are inevitable- case arguments will link to counterplans which will link to some disadvantages but not others, there is no fair debate without some level of tension
d. Different rhetorical strategies are inevitable- teams may debate policy and performance and regardless have to be prepared for both, there is no reason they shouldn’t have to defend against both in the same round
e. Cross-ex checks- they can clarify the nature of advocacies in cross-ex to generate offense which solves the time trade-off
f. In-round prep solves- one partner can organize speeches while the other flows, this means that at least one person will always be able to think of arguments
g. Permutations check- if you think you can get out of the links then there will be no alternative available to us which is just another reason why all of this begs the question of the framework debate
5. Now here’s our reasons why it’s hard to be negative, if we win these you should spot us the theory debate to balance things out
a. They get the first and last speech and have the opportunity to be more persuasive in the final rebuttals because we have to cover the 1ar while they can pick and choose
b. They have infinite prep time to prepare not just one but multiple affirmatives which means that if they’re worried about a specific strategy they can always change
**AFF Answers
Reappropriating the meaning of oppressive words is the ultimate confrontation to oppressive language
Butler 4 - (Judith, “Undoing Gender,” Routledge)
In the same way that the terms of an exclusionary modernity have been appropriated for progressive uses, progressive terms can be appropriated for progressive aims. The terms that we use in the course of political movements which have been appropriated by the Right or for misogynist purposes are not, for that reason, strategically out of bounds. These terms are never finally and fully tethered to a single use. The task of reappropriation is to illustrate the vulnerability of these often compromised terms to an unexpected progressive possibility; such terms belong to no one in particular; they assume a life and a purpose that exceed the uses to which they have been consciously put. They are not to be seen as merely tainted goods, too bound up with the history of oppression, but neither are they to be regarded as having a pure meaning that might be distilled from their various usages in political contexts. The task, it seems, is to compel the terms of modernity to embrace those they have traditionally excluded, where the embrace does not work to domesticate and neutralize the newly avowed term; such terms should remain problematic for the existing notion of the polity, should expose the limits of its claim to universality, and compel a radical rethinking of its parameters. For a term to be made part of a polity that has been conventionally excluded is for it to emerge as a threat to the coherence of the polity, and for the polity to survive that threat without annihilating the term. The term would then open up a different temporality for the polity, establishing for that polity an unknown future, provoking anxiety in those who seek to patrol its conventional boundaries. If there can be a modernity without foundationalism, then it will be one in which the key terms of its operation are not fully secured in advance, one that assumes a futural form for politics that cannot be fully anticipated, a politics of hope and anxiety.
Censorship fails—destroys our ability to fight dominant interpretations of words
Schram, 95 - prof social theory and policy @ Bryn Mawr College, (Sanford F. Schram, professor of social theory and policy at Bryn Mawr College, 1995, words of welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty
Euphemisms also encourage self-censorship. The politics of renaming discourages its proponents from being able to respond to inconvenient information inconsistent with the operative euphemism. Yet those who oppose it are free to dominate interpretations of the inconvenient facts. This is bad politics. Rather than suppressing stories about the poor, for instance, it would be much better to promote actively as many intelligent interpretations as possible.
Seeing language as political and fluid precludes possibility of interaction with what becomes a static subject—doesn’t address root cause or explore identity.
Dunn, 98. Robert G (Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, California State University), Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity, p 15.
While representing a number of developments resistant to easy summarization, poststructuralism, it could be said, generally addresses the decenteredness and fluidity of the subject implied by a fragmented mass culture and the proliferation of group identities associated with the interventions of cultural politics. This approach, as exemplified particularly by certain aspects of the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, translates these conditions into linguistic and discursive heterogeneity, locating potentialities of resistance in the productiveness and gaps of discursive practices. Poststructuralism thus draws attention to the multiple and unstable character of meaning and identity while at the same time refusing notions of a subject that preexists signification. However, by dissolving the subject in the workings of discourse and power, poststructuralism detaches notions of identity and difference from the social processes in which they are are rooted. Instead, most poststructuralist formulations tend to replicate the logic of signification within the commodity form, implicitly reifying the salient features of mass culture. Serving as a metaphor for mass culture, as John Mowitt (1992) has suggested, the “text” replaces the subject, obscuring the generative and formative possibilities of the interactive processes shaping and shaped by a self in a field of social relations. The disunities and instabilities textually valorized by poststructuralism thus recreate in a disembodied form the crises of identity and difference in postmodern culture while failing to address their underlying causes and how relations of identity and difference might be reconstituted or transformed within a realm of social action.
The 1AC causal focus on human intentions obscures the way that those intentions are formed by complex systemic interactions with material objects and the way that technical capacity limits and enables what they perceive as “choice”
Srnicek ’10 Nick, , PhD Student at London School of Economics and Political Science “Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local” Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Issue 2 (2010)
We must also dispense with the idea that conflict is determined by human interests alone. As the previous section on material actors showed, a major part of how conflicts emerge, evolve, and end is shaped by the surrounding objects, i.e. by the entire conflict assemblage and not merely its human aspects. In what way do nonhuman actors contribute to a micro-functional system? The standard idea of ‘functional’ is ‘for a purpose’, and in this sense, objects are precisely functional in their ability to determine their potential purposes. That being said, technical objects also have an internal consistency that is irreducible and conditions their use: as Gilbert Simondon has shown, any particular technical object has its own ‘mode of operation’ which entails establishing a consistency between all of its component parts. In this regard, they have an internal history within which they develop according to their own technological logic. 32 When placed in relation to a larger assemblage, they then begin to limit, constrain, shape, make im/possible, create, and produce new functions. As Antoine Bousquet (2009b, p. 2) argues, “Every technical object has its own specificity and presents its own resistance such that it simultaneously contributes to shaping the social field and reorganizing the various actors that are connected to it.” They provide more than just the background aspects of a conflict. One major contribution is that they alter the entire series of differential relations of movements between the components of the assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 397) provide the contrast between the bullet and the tank as an example of the ways in which material objects achieve this: It can happen that speed is abstracted as the property of a projectile, a bullet or artillery shell, which condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to immobility (for example, immobility in the First World War). But an equilibrium of forces is a phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack implies a rush or change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the tank that regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated the smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms. Thus, the very dynamics of war, and the ways in which conflict is organized and carried out (centralized and decentralized organizations), are radically altered both by the creation of new objects and new uses. Objects both constrain (e.g. the machine gun limiting territorial progress in WWI) and make possible (e.g. the tank providing new blitzkrieg maneuvers in WWII). Finally, what constitutes the singularity of a system? For our purposes, we will take a conflict system to be the spatial index of a network plagued by violent conflict. This is a space that is sometimes bounded by state borders, though this is a contingent and not necessary relationship. 33 More often, a conflict system operates both beyond these borders and heterogeneously within state borders, with some towns plagued by violence, while others continue their peaceful coexistence. 34 Conflict systems create their own space, which can contain long extended networks, as well as gaps and holes within a local geographical space. The state and its borders are merely one more actor within the system, and not an a priori prime determinant of the dynamics involved. This definition therefore includes the contiguous networks which play a significant role in the conflict system, yet do not themselves partake of the violence – e.g. the arms trade networks, the surrounding governance networks (regional and global institutions), the refugee networks, the humanitarian networks, and the surrounding economic networks. The limits of a conflict assemblage are variable, open to new additions, and subject to empirical determination. What plays a significant role in a particular conflict? What is significant and insignificant? These answers are co-determined by both the real (i.e. nonconceptual) instance of conflict, and the level of theoretical sophistication. What ANT attempts to do is to open one’s theory beyond its habitual analysis of conflict, and to recognize the surprise that particular actors can produce. 35 A particular resource, for example, may not play a significant role in one’s theory of conflicts, yet upon coming to examine a specific conflict, it may be the case that the resource itself is a relevant actor. Actor- network theory’s refusal to a priori determine the nature or extent of the actors in a situation is what allows for it to remain open to such surprises. To summarize, conflict is not a battle between two macro-actors, but rather a micro- functional and often self-perpetuating and self-sufficient system that emerges from the connections between human and nonhuman actors of varying sizes within a single assemblage.
Focus on language creates a new hierarchy of discourses rather than abolishing the present one—means we can’t understand human behavior except in the context of discourse.
Dunn, 98. Robert G (Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, California State University), Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity, p 219-220.
Identity and difference thus dwell within sociality. Unlike the many postmodernists who see only fragmentation and disunity in social and cultural life, Mead saw a multifariousness rooted in the principle of emergence and contained within the unifying and universalizing potentialities of language and self. Refusing to take “sides,” Mead viewed plurality and unity as alternating and ongoing phases of the social universe. Significantly, his very concept of the social presupposed difference, but it was this difference that provided the materials for the constitution of a social self, and by implication, of identity. The dilemmas of the poststructuralist position originating in a displacement of the earlier idealisms, which sanctified innate consciousness, to an objectified realm of textuality where the ego is dispersed in discourse. Instead of constructing a conception of the relations of subject and object that might reconcile them, poststructuralism simply reverses the Cartesian order of privileging, creating an objectivistic idealism/materialism in which the very concept of meaning of forcefully reduced to discursive relations of difference. This new “metaphysics of the text,” as it has been called, leaves the perennial problems of consciousness unsolved. Without a theory of how consciousness is constituted socially and symbolically, it is impossible to account for identity formation or to reflect on the dynamics and consequences of difference. The naturalistically and symbolically based pragmatist social psychology of Mead provides the tools for theorizing how identity develops within a social process while appreciating its discursive character. As Mead demonstrates, the idea of a self remains a necessary precondition for redeeming subjectivity in the face of objectivistic and culturally reified accounts that, while revealing the power of signification, ultimately imprison our understanding of human behavior within the boundaries of language.
Emphasis on language means an ignorance of concrete reality and is a refusal of true engagement.
Taft-Kaufmann, 95. Jill (professor, Department of Speech Communication And Dramatic Arts Central Michigan), Other Ways: Postmodernism and Performance Praxis in Southern Communication Journal, 1930-3203, Volume 60, Issue 3, 26-27
If the lack of consistency between postmodernism's self-styled allegiance to the oppositional and its collaboration with the existing state of academic practice were its only shortcoming, it should be enough to prevent us from unquestioningly embracing it as a theory. More disquieting still, however, is its postulation of the way the world around us works. Theory that presumes to talk about culture must stand the test of reality. Or, as Andrew King states, "culture is where we live and are sustained. Any doctrine that strikes at its root ought to be carefully scrutinized" (personal communication, February 11, 1994). If one subjects the premise of postmodernism to scrutiny, the consequences are both untenable and disturbing. In its elevation of language to the primary analysis of social life and its relegation of the de-centered subject to a set of language positions, postmodernism ignores the way real people make their way in the world. While the notion of decentering does much to remedy the idea of an essential, unchanging self, it also presents problems. According to Clarke (1991): Having established the material quality of ideology, everything else we had hitherto thought of as material has disappeared. There is nothing outside of ideology (or discourse). Where Althusser was concerned with ideology as the imaginary relations of subjects to the real relations of their existence, the connective quality of this view of ideology has been dissolved because it lays claim to an outside, a real, an extra-discursive for which there exists no epistemological warrant without lapsing back into the bad old ways of empiricism or metaphysics. (pp. 25-26) Clarke explains how the same disconnection between the discursive and the extra-discursive has been performed in semiological analysis: Where it used to contain a relation between the signifier (the representation) and the signified (the referent), antiempiricism has taken the formal arbitrariness of the connection between the signifier and signified and replaced it with the abolition of the signified (there can be no real objects out there, because there is no out there for real objects to be). To the postmodernist, then, real objects have vanished. So, too, have real people. Smith (1988) suggests that postmodernism has canonized doubt about the availability of the referent to the point that "the real often disappears from consideration" (p. 159). Real individuals become abstractions. Subject positions rather than subjects are the focus. The emphasis on subject positions or construction of the discursive self engenders an accompanying critical sense of irony which recognizes that "all conceptualizations are limited" (Fischer, 1986, p. 224). This postmodern position evokes what Connor (1989) calls "an absolute weightlessness in which anything is imaginatively possible because nothing really matters" (p. 227). Clarke (1991) dubs it a "playfulness that produces emotional and/or political disinvestment: a refusal to be engaged" (p. 103). The luxury of being able to muse about what constitutes the self is a posture in keeping with a critical venue that divorces language from material objects and bodily subjects. The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987).
The notion that the world is a social construction presumes the ontological given-ness of language without explaining the emergence of linguistic structures which are affected by the non-linear dynamics of other systems such as the neurological and the biological. Social construction is simply an erection of a new class of epistemic fundamentalism, incapable of explaining the emergence of particular identities and meanings upon which it depends
Srnicek, ‘7 Nick, PhD Student at London School of Economics and Political Science “Assemblage Theory,
Complexity and Contentious Politics The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze” MA Thesis, University of Western Ontario,
By focusing so strongly on the objective expression of subjectivity (whether it be language or any other social product), social constructivism neglects the transcendental conditions for, on one hand, language itself to emerge, and on the other hand, subjectivity to arise. As Gilles Deleuze will argue, language is not self-sufficient nor is the subject a self-positing individual.28 The critical realist position (with which we agree on this point) would argue that while language itself may explain much within the social world, it cannot itself be taken as a given. What is taken as unproblematically given in one study, must be put into question in another. In other words, while language may provide the conditions for any number of social processes, what are the conditions of language? In this regard, critical realists have made an important point in highlighting the need for transcendental study. Without it, science becomes dogmatic, locked into an assumed point of origin. Moreover, it reduces the likelihood of interdisciplinary communication by ignoring the possibility that other disciplines may provide the conditions for a particular discipline. For instance, what sorts of biological and neurological mechanisms support the capacities of language? By contrast, in social constructivism (particularly its modern-day mutation into a catch-all term that equates it with the belief that “everything is language”), language and other objectivations are given the status of ontological fundamentals; what is is simply the structures of discourse and meaning, from which particular discursive objects, identities, and meanings emerge. Taken as simply given to us in phenomenological experience, objectivations become the sole framework for empirical research. As a result, Berger and Luckmann’s social constructivism falls into the same trap as the positivists: they reduce ontology to a matter of empiricism – what Bhaskar will refer to as ‘empirical realism’. In other words, by resting their ontological foundations on Schutz’s phenomenology, they take what exists to be limited to what can be experienced from a subjective perspective. Epistemology and the question of what we can know through experience are consequently privileged over ontology and the transcendental search for the conditions of a phenomenon.
A2: Language First
Reducing politics to language impoverishes our understanding of military power and imposes a totalitarian conceptual schema onto the chaos of politics
Srnicek, ‘7 Nick, PhD Student at London School of Economics and Political Science “Assemblage Theory,
Complexity and Contentious Politics The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze” MA Thesis, University of Western Ontario,
The first dimension, therefore, is that of the material/expression distinction and all the variants that lie in between.143 In a political ontology, the material aspects include elements such as the human bodies and brains which permit social interaction. They can also include the various technological tools (such as those which constitute military power), physical resources (such as oil or water), and spatial settings (such as the architecture of a building or city,144 or the geographical location of a particular place). Communication infrastructures are also material aspects of assemblages. On the other hand, expression can also take a wide variety of forms: most obviously in spoken and written language, but also cultural signs, or laws. In social movements, they can also include expressions of solidarity, among other elements as we will see. Nations rely upon various symbols, rites, traditions and practices to constitute an expression of the ‘imagined community’. On an individual level, they can include things like minor gestures and inflections of local dialects. While – as with every distinction in Deleuze – these two extremes can be abstractly separated, in concrete situations we are faced with assemblages which can blur the distinction. For instance, while military power may consist of specific physical and technological objects (and therefore be material), it is also the case that these objects act as an expression of a nation’s strength (as noted by a number of international relations theorists).145 The role which a component plays is therefore dependent upon which capacity it is exerting. This example also reveals an important point about the nature of expression: it is not reducible to either linguistics or to representation. On the one hand, expression includes a vast array of components which cannot meaningfully be reduced to a matter of texts (such as facial expressions in face-toface contact, or acts of contestation in social movements). On the other hand, it can not be said that expression simply represents an underlying state of affairs. It is not solely a question of understanding the meaning of various expressions, but of understanding how they function within a larger assemblage.146 This is the key point to note about expression: it is itself within the world having real effects on its surroundings; it is not distinct from the world, abstractly representing it, nor is it simply a matter of transmitting information. Expression is a real force within the world and as such, has the same ontological status as material. At the same time, expression and material must be seen as having a disjunctive non-relation “for two reasons: the statement [i.e. expression] has its own correlative object and is not a proposition designating a state of things or a visible object, as logic would have it; but neither is the visible [i.e. the material] a mute meaning, a signified of power to be realized in language, as phenomenology would have it.”147 This is the case because the material of an assemblage is not simply a chaotic matter waiting for form-ation by a signifier; rather it contains its own form, along with its own substance.148 In other words, there is a substance of material and a form of material. Likewise, expression too contains both a substance of expression and a form of expression. This militates against any reduction to a signifier/signified model, or to a hylomorphic model which would rely upon a transcendent ordering. As a result, there is a fourfold division within the first dimension of assemblages.149 The “non-relation” between expression and material does not, however, deny that they enter into interactions. Rather, the idea of the non-relation “says that there is no isomorphism or homology, nor any common form to seeing and speaking, to the visible and the articulable. [Instead] the two forms spill over into one another, as in a battle. The image of a battle signifies precisely that there is no isomorphism.”150 We can see this clearly in the disjunction posed by Foucault between the discursive and the non-discursive.151 The concrete disciplinary assemblage contains, in one actualization, the prison and penal law. On the one hand, in the prison there is both a certain ‘substance of material’ (the bodies of singular prisoners with their own properties and capacities, along with the physical material required for the prison) and a particular ‘form of material’ (the architecture of the prison, the distribution of light and darkness in the Panopticon principle, the practices of regimentation). On the other hand, the penal law system has its own ‘form of expression’ (the set of statements pertaining to delinquency, the history of legal precedents, the organization of legal arguments, etc.) which creates its own ‘substance of expression’ (the discursive objects produced by the various definitions of ‘delinquency’).
TECH TALK QRITIQ
1NC Tic Tac
The affirmative’s fascination with technology mutes the maternal voice which makes technology a tool by which male defense intellectuals can fulfill their fantasies of world domination and control
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
Conclusion
In a related study, I (Honey, 1988) investigated the ways in which adolescent boys and girls appropriated and made meaning out of a computerized fantasy role-playing game modelled on Dungeons and Dragons. The fantasy scenarios that boys constructed as they interacted with this simulated world elaborated and expanded upon the symbolic content of the game. Indeed, the boys were able to use the game environment as a source of narcissistic satisfaction and confirmation. The girls, in contrast, constructed multiple interpretations of the game, some of which resisted or refused the fantasy content altogether.
The metaphors that such games embody — metaphors of conquest, domination, and control — allow young boys to slide easily and effortlessly into the universe of play so that the process of developing expertise and triumphing over the game-world is a much more seamless experience for them than it is for girls. Video games are both simulated worlds that hold out to the player the possibility of ultimate control through the elimination of ambiguity, and they are fantasy spaces in which dramas unfold, often leading the player on a heroic quest of one sort or another. The appeal of video games resides in their unique blending of these two dimensions of experience.6
For the men in our study, computers embody both of these elements — they are unpredictable, mysterious and deeply puzzling, and yet they are environments in which control can be achieved through systematic analysis and problem solving. It is the blending of these two processes — mystery and mastery — that makes computers particularly alluring objects for the men. Like the boys playing video games, the men are comfortable with the discourse that surrounds the technological universe — they appropriate its procedures and practices and make use of its terminology. They locate the source of their satisfaction and pleasure in the instruments with which they work, and for the majority of them the quest that is most satisfying is one that takes them deeper and deeper into the soul of the machine.
What, then, might we make of the other voice we hear — the voice that is distinctly maternal in tone? It is not an expression of innate femininity — an indication that by virtue of our sex we are more nurturing and peaceloving. As Sara Ruddick (1989) points out, this kind of “rhetoric and the theory run up against two facts: men are not so warlike and women are certainly not peaceful” (p. 151). Rather, the fact that we hear these maternal voices suggests both a way in which we locate ourselves in our work as women, and a means whereby we domesticate or “make-safe” technologies that are otherwise experienced as threatening. The former is expressive, the later defensive — and these postures are taken up simultaneously; one does not exist without the other.
“tech talk” discourse, method, and ideology, completely leaves behind the human world – the affirmative is just another instance in which defense intellectuals try to propagate new technologies and ignore the representations and effects of their discourse and methodology
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
The absence of human agency is a feature of technocratic discourse that arises from its technophilia and technological determinism, as well as from naturalising human conceptions about economy and society, while at the same time dehumanising the language. That is, within technocratic discourse, new technology is simply assumed to be positive and inevitable [39; 11, 22; 23, 281-282]. According to technocracy, what is needed is not a decision about technology’s efficacy or appropriateness for the needs of humankind; but rather that the technology needs “drivers” who, of course, come from the ranks of technocracy. With the “black box” of technocratic terminologies to propagate these technologies, and their means of control, technocrats determine whether the technology will be used (really not a question given its technocratically ascribed inevitability), and also operate its social levers. As well, technocrats render the politicaleconomic world in “objective” descriptions using the taxonomies of the prevailing orthodoxy. According to technocracy, this objective political-economic universe acts in ways that are determined by immutable and self-evident economic laws of the market [39, 11, 12]. These internationalised notions of political economy are a kind of ‘economic imperialism’ in which ‘idealisations of economic reason’ are operationalised to overcome the ‘stubbornly resisting sludge’ of civil society [40, 69 - 70].
Linguistically, people can be removed as easily from sentences, just as they are removed from the technological and political-economic models that technocrats use to formulate policies. Ideally, technocracy, as discourse, method, and ideology, adopts values which ‘completely leave behind the specifically human world’ [Oakeshott, in 12 , 88]. What the science of economics requires, according to Oakeshott, a conservative proponent of a neo-classical economic technocracy, is complete separation from a ‘vocabulary which suggests this [human] world’ [in 12, 88].
Linguistic removal of people can happen when agency is unclear, when passive voice is used, and when third person existential processes (especially expletive forms such as There are or It is) are used. However, the most effective method is the agentless passive form. Not surprisingly, technocratic texts are often characterised by ‘agentless passive clause structures’ [15, 60]: that is, the absence of specifically human activity. An effective clause needs agency even if it is implicit [35, 168 - 169]. Agency is the part of the sentence that makes or causes something to happen. In sentences using relational processes, most common in scientific and technical writing, the agent causes non-human carriers to have attributes [41, 264-265]; for example Lowering interest rates Leads to share price rises. Agent / Attributor Predicate: causative Carrier Attribute
The alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative and its technological discourse to release ourselves from the tyranny of its concepts
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Suffice it to say that the issues about language do not disappear after you have mastered technostrategic discourse. The seductions remain great
You can find all sorts of ways to seemingly beat the boys at their own game;
you can show how even within their own definitions of rationality, most of what is happening in the development and deployment of nuclear forces is
wildly irrational. You can also impress your friends and colleagues with sickly humorous stories about the way things really happen on the inside. There is tremendous pleasure in it, especially for those of us who have been closed out, who have been told that it is really all beyond us and we should just leave it to the benevolently paternal men in charge.
But as the pleasures deepen, so do the dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason defense intellectuals in their own games gets you thinking
inside their rules, tacitly accepting all the unspoken assumptions of their
paradigms. You become subject to the tyranny of concepts. The language shapes your categories of thought (e.g., here it becomes "good nukes" or
bad nukes," not, nukes or no nukes) and defines the boundaries of imagination (as you try to imagine a "minimally destabilizing basing mode" rather than a way to prevent the weapon from being deployed at all).
2NC Framework
The negative gets to test the assumptions and discourse behind the affirmative
WM their framework – the alternative is to reject the plan in the context of policy making which means Congress could reject the plan
The affirmative can weigh the affects of plan after they have justified their representations and discourse
a. education – technostrategic discourse shapes the way we understand and relate to policy issues which makes it a prerequisite to evaluating the affects of the plan
their framework forces reliance on military elite experts who are solely motivated by the propagation of new technologies and excludes the possibility of real social change
b. fairness – they should be prepared to defend the core technological assumption of their AFF
aff specificity bias means get they get to pick the literature and assumptions they want to defend
They limit out an entire literature base devoted to analyzing the impacts of discourse and its harmful effects on policy making
If they don’t have to defend their dispositionality towards their language and the plan than they don’t have to defend anything
They claim advantages off wanting to be a policy maker – we should be able to challenge their defined discourse policed by technostrategic discourse which we are forced to learn in order to become initiated into the debate space
Debate then becomes the smoke filled rooms of male defense intellectuals discussing mass slaughters
Policy making fails –
Reliance on the state constructs the affirmative as a protection racket that attempts to legitimize exploitation and militarism through false rationalization to exhort the ballot
Peterson 92
[V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered States: Feminist (re)visions of International Relations Theory”, p. 1992, p. 51-52, MA]
What do we know about large-scale protection systems? Defining a racketeer as "someone who creates a threat and then changes for its reduction” Tilly pursues the analogy of slate making and war making as “quintessential protection rackets”:
To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or arc consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same way as racketeers.
As Tilly notes, this is not to argue that “government authority rests only’ on the threat or violence. Nor does it entail the assumption that a government’s only service is protection.”0’ Rather, the argument is that effective state making depends upon militarism, extraction, capital accumulation, and ideological legitimation. In the absence or “escape routes” or sufficient power to resist centralizing forces, options 11w seeking security are severely limited: lacking “secure” alternatives, one is “forced” to participate in state forms or protection.
Similarly, feminists have explored the dynamics or marriage as a protection racket: systemic male violence against women and our position in the labor market “force” us into marriage as protection from these systemic threats to our security. The gender politics of marriage and the family, cannot be understood without recognizing women’s vulnerability: women select marriage as a form of Protection in large part because their choices— within systems reproducing structural violence—are severely limited. Like state protection rackets, this is not to argue that negative constructions or “protection” exhaust the meaning or marriage: protection rackets do permit (but do not in fact guarantee) some forms of security (economic support. sex/affective pleasures, privacy), especially those denied to nonparticipants.
The point is, of course, that as protection rackets, states and marriage are implicated in the reproduction or hierarchies and in the structural violence against which they claim to offer protection; It is illuminating to review how the systemic costs and insecurities or protection rackets are so effectively mystified. First. individual participants making “rational” choices to 'accept” protection, simultaneously act “irrationally” by reproducing systemic dependency. Benefits to individual units appear secured but at the expense of either system based equity and justice or long-term system sustainability. For example, in the case of slates the appearance of protection is paid for in the perpetuation of structural violence and in the security dilemma posed by the stale system, global ecology, and capitalist economics. Second, the decentralization of units and their linkage through the protector/"center" (rather than “locally’) obscures the “collective interest” that the protected may have in a transformation of the system itself. Preoccupation with maintaining whatever security one can, or jockeying for marginal improvements, may resituate certain protectees but reproduces the asymmetrical system dynamics and “competition” for “scarce” security. Similarly, to the extent that protection is ‘working.” the protected lack incentives to risk destabilization and/or potential loss or what security they have.
Third, protection systems reproduce nonparticipatory dynamics while obscuring accountability of protectees for maintaining boundaries, hierarchies, and identities that are the medium and outcome of protection systems. Distance from protector roles Leaves decision-making and threat assessment to those with particular interests that are only ambiguously related to ‘collective interests.” Identification of the protected with their protectors (as opposed to other protectees), as well as identification of protectors with each other, further complicates alliance formation directed at transforming the system itself. Protection systems also distort the meaning or “consent” by both mystifying the violence that backs up the systemic inequality and perpetuating the illusion or equality among parties to “contractual obligations.’ 10i)
Technocratic discourse is characterized by ‘self-validating hypotheses which are monopolistically repeated and become hypnotic definitions
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
Technocratic discourse ‘ventriloquates’ scientific discourse [15, 77] to claim rational objectivity and to promote action supposedly based on reason and fact: ‘economists, political scientists and sociologists in particular have attempted to imitate scientific analysis through the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, but, above all, through their parodies of the worst of the scientific dialects’ [12, 49]. However, although it adopts positivist science’s claims to identify “true” causes, technocratic discourse ‘begins with an action it covertly wants to recommend as policy, and then cites “research evidence” and “studies” which show that this action is a necessary cause of something else that is positively valued by those to be convinced’ [15, 71]. Because technocratic discourse can prescribe and proscribe action according to “objective” knowledge and principles, and moreso because it is written mostly by a small number of people representating the interests of multinational enterprises and operationalised by supranational legislative bodies, such as the WTO [20], opposition to technocratic language becomes difficult. However, when looked at more closely, the discourse is characterised by ‘self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations’ [16, 28]. For example, the claim is often made ‘that democracy issued from the womb of the marketplace’: that is, that free speech and free elections are a function of free trade, a clearly contestable assertion [12, 46; cf. 21].
The language of technocracy is a closed discourse that treats opposition as incorrect propaganda [16, 80]. Because “incorrect” oppositional discourses are often cast as naïve “common sense”, they are pervasively denigrated by technocrats, and are tacitly supposed to defer to the more intelligent scientific knowledge generated by the technical elite [15, 71]. In this way, the pseudo-scientific language of technocracy legitimises its claims to power in matters that are uniquely social in nature, simultaneously silencing “common-sense” opposition by their claims to expertise.
Link – Hegemony/Unilateralism
The affirmative’s representations construct the US as a rational masculine international leader --- the protector over the other feminine ‘unruly’ nations
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick ‘3
Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Working Paper No. 104 “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security. Sara Ruddick is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Feminist Studies at Lang College of the New School for Social Research, USA. She is the author of Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace and numerous other publications on feminist studies, just war theory, and nonviolence.
As we have already stated, we find WMD themselves intrinsically morally indefensible, no matter who possesses them, and we are concerned about the wide array of costs to any state of development and deployment. We therefore reject the discourse’s implicit division of “good” and “bad,” “safe” and “unsafe” WMD, (defined as good or bad depending on who possesses them). Our concern is to understand how some WMD are rendered invisible (“o urs”) and some visible (“theirs”); some rendered malignant and others benign.
Here, we join others in noting that the language in which the case against “proliferation” is made is ethno-racist and contemptuous. Generally, in Western proliferation discourse as a whole, a distinction is drawn between “the ‘Self’(seen as responsible) vs the non-Western Unruly Other.”36 The US represents itself as a rational actor, while representing the Unruly Other as emotional, unpredictable, irrational, immature, misbehaving. Not only does this draw on and reconstruct an Orientalist portrayal of third world actors37; it does so through the medium of gendered terminology. By drawing the relations between possessors and non-possessors in gendered terms – the prudential, rational, advanced, mature, restrained, technologically- and bureaucratically- competent (and thus “masculine”) Self, versus the emotional, irrational, unpredictable, uncontrolled, immature, primitive, undisciplined, technologically-incompetent (and thus “feminine”) Unruly Other – the discourse naturalizes and legitimates the Self/possessor states having weapons which the Other does not. By drawing on and evoking gendered imagery and resonances, the discourse naturalizes the idea that “We” / the US / the responsible father must protect, must control and limit “her,” the emotional, out-of-control state, for her own good, as well as for ours.
This Western proliferation discourse has had a function in the wider context of US national security politics. With the end of the “Evil Empire” in the late 1980s, until the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the US appeared to be without an enemy of grand enough proportions to justify maintaining its sprawling military- industrial establishment. This difficulty was forestalled by the construction of the category of “rogue states” – states seen as uncontrollable, irresponsible, irrational, malevolent, and antagonistic to the West.38 Their unruliness and antagonism was represented as intrinsic to their irrational nature; if it were not in their “nature,” the US would have needed to ask more seriously if actions on the part of the West had had any role in producing that hostility and disorder.
The discourse of WMD proliferation has been one of the principal means of producing these states as major threats. To say this is neither to back away from our position opposing weapons of mass destruction, nor to assess the degree to which WMD in the hands of “Other” states actually do threaten the US, the “Other” states’ regional opponents, or their own population. But it is an assessment of the role of WMD proliferation discourse in naturalizing and legitimating otherwise-difficult-to-make-appear-rational programs and expenditures such as National Missile Defense.39
Link – BMD
The affirmative’s BMD discourse engages in “tech talk” which alienates those who are not in the exclusive ‘club’ of missile defense experts
Cristina Masters ‘3
“Tales of the Shield: A Feminist Reading of Ballistic Missile Defence”
Cristina Masters Doctoral Candidate Department of Political Science York University YCISS Working Paper Number 23 March 2003
Cristina Masters is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.
Too often we forget, as academics and policy makers, that the spaces and places within which international politics largely get made, are in the everyday. Television shows such as the West Wing probably do much more to constitute people’s understanding of foreign policy than State of the Union addresses; 24 probably does much more to constitute people’s understanding of the war on terror than White House press briefings. Most everyday people do not know what a ‘ballistic missile’ is, but they know that there are people out there who may want to use ‘them’ against ‘us.’ What everyday people do understand, is the idea of a ‘shield’(see Table 1). The metaphor of the shield vibrates through these often disparate spaces as a nexus of understanding that bridges the formal, the practical, and the popular. What gets taken up at the level of the everyday matters for how we claim to know, legitimate, justify, and/or critique the politics of missile defence. My primary interest in the politics of ballistic missile defence is how the metaphor of the shield frames, while not entirely enclosing, the range of possibilities for how we can think of missile defence in the everyday. To imagine how one removed from the formal discourse of missile defence comes to know it, participate in it, and instantiate it in the everyday. But first with the formalities…
Form(alities)
Missile defence, dating back to Reagan’s SDI, has mostly been about words, especially when we consider that there is yet no concrete reality to missile defence (outside of some tests, the majority of which have failed). Instead ballistic missile defence (BMD) has operated fundamentally at the level of discourse. Discourses, however, that are not open to everyone and prove rather difficult to enter into if one is not already part of the exclusive ‘club’ of missile defence experts: defence intellectuals and academics, military personnel, and government officials. If one is ostensibly ‘outside’ of the exclusive club, or if one is unfamiliar with or does not know the specialised language in and around missile defence and nuclear weapons (specialised languages that are now fundamentally intertwined) it a priori limits who can speak, and importantly what one can then say. If one does not know the specialised language of ballistic missile defence – booster phase, midcourse, exo-atmospheric kill vehicle, hit-to-kill interceptor, land-based, sea-based, air-based – and what this all means and then some, it proves rather difficult to enter into the debate. It also has implications for who gets taken seriously. A selected list of ballistic missile terminology taken from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (Table 2), illustrates these points. This small selection of missile defence discourse reflects how difficult it would be to enter into debates around ballistic missile defence if one is unfamiliar with the language. If one heard the word ‘ked,’ ‘bus,’ ‘penaid,’ or ‘RV,’ one would most likely assume the references would be to the popular tennis shoe, a yellow school bus, a pocket protector for pens, or a recreation vehicle, respectively, certainly not to ‘kill enhancement devices,’ ‘post-boost’ vehicles, missile ‘penetration aides,’ or ‘re-entry’ vehicles. As Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King (1994) argue: “language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing social realities. Rather, it is assumed that a particular vision of social reality gets inscribed in language – a vision of reality that does not serve all of its speakers equally.”(59)
Link – Technology
The Affirmatives use of technology as a means of solving problems breeds an obsession in which defense intellectuals never actually solve problems because they are constantly re-invent more problems so attempt to develop a solution
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
The Men Pleasure in the Process of Abstraction
Every once in a while, it may be every several weeks to maybe even every few months, I come on a problem that really excites me and gets me running, I mean, I sort of eat drink and sleep it for a period of time... I can give you an example of one that obsessed me for a while, and I certainly enjoyed. ...Five years ago, we needed to go into software production, large scale software production, and we needed to have software tools with which to do that. I was the guy charged with coming up with the software tools, either finding them on the market or creating them. So, I had been able to find these things called assemblers on the market, and we even ordered a quarter million dollar machine, that would be able to run some assemblers... But I wasn’t very happy with the performance of any of these assemblers, they all seemed to run too slow, and, you know, they would inhibit the creative process... So one night I was just thinking about, well, gee, couldn’t I... make it faster? And I reduced the problem to a matter of what I call symbol look-up. Symbol look-up’s gotta be the critical thing, how fast can I do symbol look-up on, on our little home computers, on our IBM pc’s? So I then worked on that problem for a little while, just kicking it around in my head, and got it down to I think about an eight instruction loop. Eight little instructions, and from those eight instructions, I immediately extrapolated and figured out that I could make an assembler that ran close to a hundred times faster than anything else existing... (32, programmer, software company)
...We had a situation at the beginning of last year, where we had to think about how to represent the types of interactions people do on a computer, and ...hired some people who were in the Ph.D. program at Columbia in AI, to work at a plan I had for representing videotext interactions, or computer interactions... And we built this whole system, it was really quite elegant, and it caused us to have to abstract a lot of the types of things you do on computer, a lot of the types of interactions and a lot of types of responses, and what you do with that information. It was very good work, it was the type of work I like to do, trying to abstract and represent it, knowledge representation... So I like to abstract things, I like to write knowledge representation things. That’s something I really like, to draw the sort of design phase, to solve the design problems. (28, programmer, software company)
...We’ve always had the attitude that we could - as far as what could be done on computer, we could do it. ...There came a time when I was doing the main editor core, which allows um, which the other parts of the editor use to edit text, and put up different windows, and things like that, and it came to a point where we wanted to allow as much functionality as possible. ...It was very slow, it just seemed to be unacceptably slow. And I remember, ...I just sat and I said “boy, we’re really in a jam now - I mean, it does a lot, but we’re working on a machine that runs very slowly, you know, what can we do?” ...And we just put a little mind effort together, and, ah, on one issue we came up with a way of, of speeding it up, and then I came up with some hardware scrolling and doing some other things, that together it sped up the program to a desired speed. And to me that was problem solving in its simplest form. Where we saw a problem that we had no idea how to solve it, and we were able to, in the process, just thinking about it, we were able to come up with some great ideas, and it was very encouraging... (27, programmer, software company)
The kinds of things that I like, I’ve sort of burned out on them a bit, but what I did like – the software we did was pretty technically complicated compared to most kids’ software, that is the underlying models were complicated. I don’t know whether it shows up on the screen, but there was a lot of kind of math and problem-solving in the programming which I liked, and which was pretty difficult for me. But it was the kind of stuff I thought I should be able to know how to do, because I couldn’t see anything that I obviously didn’t know how to do. So I do enjoy that kind of pretty well-defined, highly specified problem, which was very obvious if you got it right and very obvious when you got it wrong. And, you know, computers are marvelous things to let you go all night at them, so I spent a lot of enjoyable time just locked in to problems. So solving some of the programming problems I think was the most enjoyable part for me. (39, programmer, educational development group)
The pleasure these four men derive from their work comes from a kind of mental wrestling they engage in with the ideas and procedures they generate in relation to the technology. They delight in mental effort, in kicking ideas around in their heads, in abstraction, and extrapolation. There is a sense that these men see themselves as taking risks that they alone are challenging themselves, and that the projects they work on involve a great deal of technical sophistication. One gets a sense that the enterprises these men work on are large, their missions are difficult, they carry the burden for success and failure, and they deeply enjoy the challenges involved. There is also an obsessive quality to what they do — they eat, and drink, and sleep these problems. There is talk about being locked in, and one gets a sense as well that they derive erotic pleasure from these obsessive and engaging tasks — computers are marvelous things to let you go all night at them.
Their descriptions are laden with technical terminology — there is talk of target machines, symbol lookups, and instruction loops. Technology is the topic of conversation; there are no human reference points; the universe that gives them satisfaction is an exclusively technical one.
The affirmative’s technocratic discourse makes use of abstractions such as “efficiency” and “the national interest” to justify their actions which is based false justifications
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
This paper critically analyses the intersection of economic and technical discourses in the genre of technocratic discourse. The function of technical writing and communication, and indeed language in general, is to ‘organize reality’ [1, 169]. This is especially the case for technical writing in the physical sciences which organises reality according to relatively strict traditions [2, 3]. The tradition of logical positivism, with its emphasis on logical relations between words and what they represent [3], is responsible, in large part, for the rigorous way in which scientists describe the physical world. As Halliday and Martin [1] show, scientific language has a clearly recognisable grammar, form, and function appropriate to its use in the physical sciences [1, 38]. We argue that a specific form of technocratic discourse, the discourse of “globalisation”, normatises neoclassical economic ideology in the process of advancing what appears to be technical solutions to currently perceived problems.
Scientific discourse, at least its lexico-grammatical guise, has steadily crept into widespread use, not only into the social sciences, but also into the languages of business, government, and international policy centres. While scientific discourse may be quite appropriate to some areas of these fields, we argue here that technocrats use the apparent objectivity of scientific discourse for mostly manipulative purposes by presenting ‘highly contentious’ statements as ‘uncontentious’–often, indeed, as fact [1, 197]. Technocratic discourse has become a recognisable feature of public policy, business, and the social sciences in the current milieu of economic and social upheaval [4; 5, chapt. 1]. In this paper, we focus most specifically on the discourse of ‘globalisation’, which is widely construed as the rationale for sweeping economic reforms throughout the developed and developing worlds [4] .
"Globalisation" is an abstraction of the highest order: it has no independent physical existence. But policy makers, from the relatively insignificant Queensland State Government [6] and the Australian Federal Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade [DFAT] [7], to the largest international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) [8] , the International Monetary Fund [IMF] (1998)[9], and the World Trade Organisation [WTO] (1999) [10] all claim "globalisation" as their rationale for sweeping reforms.
The arguments underpinning the discourse of “globalisation”, at least as it is presented by today’s technocrats, are far less rational and objective than they appear to be at first glance. This is a function of the genre we are describing here. We argue that technocratic discourse makes use of abstractions such as “globalisation”, “efficiency”, “the national interest”, and so on, in much the same way that the great religions have named their gods as the ultimate arbiter of individual fate, past and future fortunes, and, indeed, the well-being of entire nations. Naturally, we find the technocratic use of language disturbing and potentially damaging.
Link – Weapons
The affirmative’s fixation on weapons pegs the arms race as the problem and some change in that race as the solution which only encourages the proliferation of more weapons
Schwartz and Derber 93 -- William A. Schwartz, a professor of property law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, and Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION: WHY THE ARMS RACE DOESN’T MATTER- AND WHAT DOES, University of California Press, 1993. p. 1-3.
For many years, a striking consensus has reigned: the nuclear arms race between the superpowers is the main source of danger. The arms race is "the central concern of the closing years of the century," the cause célèbre of our time. A U.S. senator says that "the very survival of our planet, the survival of the human race, is at stake," a common view.[1]
The right, the center, and the left disagree, of course, about how the United States should run the arms race. The right urges us to build weapons like the MX missile, the Stealth bomber, and "Star Wars"; the center, to sign arms control treaties like INF and START with the Soviet Union; and the left, to stop and then reverse the arms race through a test ban, a "freeze," and huge reductions in nuclear arsenals. But all focus on the hardware, the weapons themselves. Most of the nuclear debate concerns which weapons should be deployed and which destroyed.
But short of near-total nuclear disarmament, we believe that no change in the arms race can in fact make a profound difference. MX, Star Wars, INF, a freeze, or even a 90 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals cannot reliably change the horror of a nuclear war. They cannot much affect the risk that the nuclear states will plunge us into that horror. They cannot make the world much safer or more dangerous than it already is.
The nuclear danger is real—even more ominous, as we will show, than most people appreciate. But the fixation on weapons has obscured the real menace: the political conflict and violence raging around the world that could one day burn out of control and set off a nuclear cataclysm. As the world debates largely irrelevant missiles and arms control treaties, the superpowers are fanning the flames of conflict and war from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, Lebanon to Cambodia. Forty years of history reveal that such conflicts can suddenly veer out of control and even erupt into open superpower confrontation. Yet in a time of unprecedented public concern about nuclear war, few—even in the peace movement—protest the nuclear hazards of their governments' foreign intrigues and interventions.
Those of us concerned with the nuclear threat have long been like the apocryphal drunk who searches for his lost keys hour after hour under a lamppost—because it's light there. The giant weapons systems are seductive, the obvious place to look for answers to the nuclear peril. The light there is good. But there is little to be found. If we want the keys to a safer world, we must turn the light to the real conflicts and battlefields where the superpowers and their clients confront each other every day, often hidden from public view, and where they periodically collide in terrifying crises that threaten to provoke worldwide catastrophe.
The Absolute Weapon
Public issues generally develop a "culture," a consensus about the key questions, the level of analysis, and the language of debate. Since these assumptions are shared, they rarely come up for discussion.
The common perspective that guides discourse on nuclear war and peace is what we call the "weapons paradigm." It magnifies the importance of the weapons themselves far beyond their real significance. It views weapons as the basic source of security or insecurity, power or weakness, peace or war. It pegs the arms race as the problem and some change in that race as the solution.
If nuclear weapons were like conventional ones, then their number and technical characteristics would of course matter. But nuclear weapons are different. They are so powerful that both superpowers long ago acquired the means to utterly destroy each other along with much of the rest of the planet. For decades the arms race and arms control have changed only the number of times that we can bounce the radiating rubble of the world.
Link – Private Sector
The affirmatives attempts to increase private sector development are masked by technocratic discourse
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
The term globalisation clearly has circular allusions, and the technocratic language that describes globalisation makes good use of these allusionary connotations. Being supranationally produced, technocratic language about globalisation generally seeks to show why national governments ought to cede regulatory responsibility to supranational agencies [22]. The discourse of globalisation transcends most previous forms of technocratic discourse insofar as its overt quasi-religious aspects. It even has its own ‘Holy Trinity’ [23, 144-47]: information technology, free trade, and the financial sector.
AT: Our Experts Good
Defining defense intellectuals as ‘experts’ is a primary aspect of technocracy which alienates and polarizes the ‘non-expert’
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
One of the defining aspects of technocracy is the polarization of an organization into "expert" and "non-expert" sectors. As bureaucracies are systematically reorganized around computerized systems, which substitute technological complexity for the organizational complexity characteristic of bureaucracy, the structure of the organization is transformed. The hierarchical division of labor characteristic of bureaucracy is simplified, flattened, and polarized into expert and non-expert sectors. Many middle-level positions are eliminated; there is a corresponding polarization of working conditions and an erosion of internal job ladders. One corporate manager in a study by Garson (1981:35) graphically described this polarization and, unwittingly, its gender overtones:
We are moving from the pyramid shape to the Mae West. The employment chart of the future will show those swellings on the top and we'll never completely get rid of those big bulges of clerks on the bottom. What we're trying to do right now is pull in that waistline [expensive middle management and skilled secretaries].
Although such polarization is not inevitable, the existing evidence indicates that it has become widely prevalent in work organizations increasingly centered around advanced technology.'
This polarization by occupational status parallels and reinforces gender segregation and circumscribes mobility prospects for women in organizations (Cornfield et al. 1987; Feldberg and Glenn 1983; Gutek 1983:164; National Research Council 1986b; Noyelle 1987; Zimmerman 1983:147). In 1980, 92.4 percent of data entry operators, 91.2 percent of bank tellers, and 91 percent of telephone operators were female, but only 22 percent of systems analysts were female (Machung 1984:132; National Research Council 1986a:4-5). Recent studies in the United Kingdom reveal that, in high-tech industries, women are in the majority in non-expert production jobs such as "stuffing boards," but that "94% of technicians, 99% of craft workers and 97% of managers were men" (Cockburn 1985:225). Similarly, Feldberg and Glenn (1980) found that the computerization of the large insurance company they studied led to a more bifurcated organizational structure, with men increasing their domination of upper levels due to their overrepresentation in high-level technical jobs, which Feldberg and Glenn found to be 95 percent male. Stroeber and Arnold (1987) in their study of computer-related occupations, found that women represented only 5 percent of computer engineers and 19.5 percent of computer scientists/systems analysts; conversely, women represented 92 percent of data-entry operators, a figure that has increased during the past decade.
The belief that the "correct" technical solutions can only be found by the experts becomes a powerful legitimation of expert power & technocracy
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Technocratic Ideology
The final characteristic of technocratic control is an ideology that assumes that technical imperatives and knowledge have displaced traditional politics in organizational decision making and management. The Taylorist idea that there is "one best way" to make any organizational decision has been revived and extended (see Stark 1980): technocratic ideology alleges that "any problems are defined in technical terms and assumed to be soluble with the aid of scientific knowledge and advanced technology" (Alvesson 1987:226). The belief that the "correct" technical solutions can only be found by the experts becomes a powerful legitimation of expert power, both within technocratic workplaces and in the overall technocratic system. As national and international economies have become larger and more complex, technocratic managers seek to maintain these systems by turning "problems of politics, expertise, and administration into problems of cybernetic systems control, the ultimate form of the 'administration of things'" (Heydebrand 1979:38).
‘experts’ monopolize formation and technical expertise in order to perpetuate the gender laden polarization in technological organization
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Zuboff (1988:251, 252) found that managers tended to monopolize information and technical expertise in order to perpetuate a clearly defined distinction between management and workers; as one manager said, "Managers perceive workers who have information as a threat. They are afraid of not being the 'expert'." One top manager was apprehensive about the social implications of the increasing bifurcation into expert and non-expert sectors: "I have asked our other top managers, where does the computer fit into the hierarchy? Will we end up with thinkers at the top, the computer at the next level down, and then the masses who if it says jump, they jump?" (Zuboff 1988:286).
Monopolization of information by the experts therefore becomes a central means of consolidating power. Even within the expert sector, Zuboff documents how upper-level managers collaborate with systems designers in order to restrict access to computerized data. Managers and technical experts often consciously restricted the flow of information; as one top manager put it,
It's OK for them [division managers] to have on on-line capacity if we control what they see. All they will have is a terminal designed for the purpose of receiving what we release to them. They will not have a keyboard. If they ask for more, then we tell them we don't have the technical capability to do what you asked for. Our technological solution includes the idea that we will transmit to them, and they will never request data from us. This way, we can control what they look at, and they could not just come in and snoop (Zuboff 1988:344).
There is, then, clear evidence that as bureaucracies are restructured around computerized systems a bifurcation into expert and non-expert sectors tends to result. Mobility prospects are reduced, as external credentialing and credential barriers replace internal job ladders (Machung 1984; Hodson 1988; Noyelle 1987; Cornfield et al. 1987). At expert levels, much of the rigidity characteristic of bureaucratic rules and task specifications tends to be replaced by more flexible and collegial types of work organization and an emphasis on horizontal communication (Mintzberg 1979; Kanter 1984; Hodson 1988). At the non-expert level, the tendency has been for tasks to become more routinized, fragmented, and automated by the system (Feldberg and Glenn 1983; Hodson 1988; National Research Council 1986a; Zuboff 1988). Women and racial minorities predominate in the non-expert sector and are underrepresented in the expert sector, making such organizational changes gender laden.
‘experts’ use technostrategic discourse which puts them in the position of the planner, escaping the nuclear war from the position of the victim
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Thus, speaking the expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape—escape from thinking of oneself as a victim of nuclear war. I do not mean this on the level of individual consciousness; it is not that defense analysts somehow convince themselves that they would not be among the victims of nuclear war, should it occur. But I do mean it in terms of the structural position the speakers of the language occupy and the perspective they get from that position. Stnieturally, speaking technostrategic language removes them from the position of victim and puts them in the position of the planner, the user, the actor. From that position, there is neither need nor way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are positionally allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of nuclear weaponry.
Finally, then, I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and long-time experts comes from characteristics of the language itself; the distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of control afforded by mastering it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. In learning the language, one goes from being the passive, powerless victim to the competent, wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self, rather than threats to it.
AT: Our authors aren’t technocrats
Their authors are technocrats
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
We use the term technocracy to indicate that the power of governing is shared in the modern state, by parliament, a bureaucracy, and a technocracy [14] . The technocracy comprises economic planners, strategic thinkers, and natural and social scientific experts. By technocrats, we mean people who transform ‘discourses of expert knowledge into discourses of social policy’ 15, 58]. They are ‘makers of politics and purveyors of mass information’ [16, 28], the ‘catalysts of the Third Industrial Revolution and the ones responsible for keeping the high-tech economy running’ [17, 175].
AT: your authors epistemology is flawed
Our evidence is based on statistical data from women in technical fields
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
Background
For the past several years a group of us at Bank Street’s Center for Children and Technology1 have been doing research on adult technology experts.2 Our inquiry was designed to counter traditional deficit model studies, which claim women are excluded from technological professions and thus have limited knowledge about technology as a whole. We were interested in the women who had gained access to and achieved a certain level of professional stature within technological worlds. In particular, we wanted to investigate their interpretive and meaning-making processes — what significance did they attribute to their work and what did they find compelling about it?
AT: Our Aff is ethical
Technostrategic discourses humanizes the weapons which makes the discussion of "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about weapons systems and not people
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Nuclear missiles are based in "silos." On a Trident submarine, which carries twenty-four multiple warhead nuclear missiles, crew members call the part of the submarine where the missiles are lined up in their silos ready for launching "the Christmas tree farm." What could be more bucolic—farms, silos, Christmas trees?
In the ever-friendly, even romantic world of nuclear weaponry, enemies "exchange" warheads; one missile "takes out" another; weapons systems can "marry up"; "coupling" is sometimes used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms of warning and response, or to the psycho-political links between strategic (intercontinental) and theater (European-based) weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVecl missile's nuclear warheads land is known as a "footprint."2' These nuclear explosives are not dropped; a "bus" "delivers" them. In addition, nuclear bombs are not referred to as bombs or even warheads; they are referred to as "reentry vehicles," a term far more bland and benign, which is then shortened to "RVs," a term not only totally abstract and removed from the reality of a bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation.
These domestic images must be more than simply one more form of distancing, one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality behind the words, ordinary abstraction is adequate to that task. Something else, something very peculiar, is going on here. Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful, perverse refusal of accountability—because to be accountable to reality is to be unable to do this work.
These words may also serve to domesticate, to tame the wild and uncontrollable forces of nuclear destruction. The metaphors minimize; they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond what the mind can encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery over the unmasterable. The fire-breathing dragon under the bed, the one who threatens to incinerate your family, your town, your planet, becomes a pet you can pat.
Using language evocative of everyday experiences also may simply serve to make the nuclear strategic community more comfortable with what they are doing. "PAL" (permissive action links) is the carefully constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. "BAMBI" was the acronym developed for an early version of an antiballistic missile system (for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). The president s Annual Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, which outlines both short- and long-range plans for production of new nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to as "the shopping list." The National Command Authorities choose from a menu of options" when deciding among different targeting plans, The cookie cutter" is a phrase used to describe a particular model of nuclear attack. Apparently it is also used at the Department of Defense to refer to the neutron bomb.0
The imagery that domesticates, that humanizes insentient weapons, may also serve, paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore sentient human bodies, human lives.23 Perhaps it is possible to spend one's time thinking about scenarios for the use of destructive technology and to have human bodies remain invisible in that technological world precisely because that world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm, and playful—the Christmas trees, the RVs, the affectionate pats. It is a world that is in some sense complete unto itself; it even includes death and loss. But it is weapons, not humans, that get "killed." "Fratricide" occurs when one of your warheads "kills" another of your own warheads. There is much discussion of "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about the vulnerability and survival of weapons systems, not people.
Technostrategic discourse makes a decision based on ethics impossible
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Incentive to launch a nuclear war arises from a particular configuration of weapons and their hypothetical mathematical interaction. Incentive can only be so narrowly defined because the referents of technostrategic paradigms are weapons—not human lives, not even states and state power.
The fact that the subjects of strategic paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there simply is no way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death simply is -collateral damage"—collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves.
Second, if human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Hence, questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be dismissed easily. No one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand to ask. The discourse among the experts remains hermetically sealed.
The problem, then, is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself—as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge. The isolation of this technical knowledge from social or psychological or moral thought, or feelings, is all seen as legitimate and necessary. The outcome is that defense intellectuals can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular political entities, particular peoples and their way of life, without actually asking if weapons can do it, or if they are the best way to do it, or whether they may even damage the entities you are supposedly protecting. It is not that the men I spoke with would say that these are invalid questions. They would, however, simply say that they are separate questions, questions that are outside what they do, outside their realm of expertise. So their deliberations go on quite independently, as though with a life of their own, disconnected from the functions and values they are supposedly to serve.
Finally, the third problem is that this discourse has become virtually the only legitimate form of response to the question of how to achieve security. If the language of weaponry was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons would be of little note. But when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering, and its entrapping qualities—the way in which, once you adopt it, it becomes so hard to stay connected to human concerns—become more comprehensible.
AT: Deterrence
Their affirmative relies on deterrence as an axiom which makes all their impacts inevitable
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick ‘3
Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Working Paper No. 104 “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security. Sara Ruddick is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Feminist Studies at Lang College of the New School for Social Research, USA. She is the author of Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace and numerous other publications on feminist studies, just war theory, and nonviolence.
Deterrence theory is an elaborate, abstract conceptual edifice, which posits a hypothetical relation between two different sets of weapons systems – or rather, between abstractions of two different sets of weapons systems, for in fact, as both common sense and military expertise tells us, human error and technological imperfection mean that one could not actually expect real weapons to function in the ways simply assumed in deterrence theory. Because deterrence theory sets in play the hypothetical representations of various weapons systems, rather than assessments of how they would actually perform or fail to perform in warfare, it can be nearly infinitely elaborated, in a never ending regression of intercontinental ballistic missile gaps and theater warfare gaps and tactical “mini- nuke” gaps, ad infinitum, thus legitimating both massive vertical proliferation and arms racing.
Deterrence theory is also a fiction in that it depends upon “rational actors,” for whom what counts as “rational” is the same, independent of culture, history, or individual difference. It depends on those “rational actors” perfectly understanding the meaning of “signals” communicated by military actions, despite dependence on technologies that sometimes malfunction; despite cultural difference and the lack of communication that is part of being political enemies; despite the difficulties of ensuring mutual understanding even when best friends make direct face-to- face statements to each other. It depends on those same “rational actors” engaging in a very specific kind of calculus that includes one set of variables (e.g., weapons size, deliverability, survivability, as well as the “credibility” of their and their opponent’s threats), and excludes other variables (such as domestic political pressures, economics, or individual subjectivity). What is striking from a feminist perspective is that even while “realists” may worry that some opponents are so “insufficiently rational” as to be undeterrable, this does not lead them to search for a more reliable form of ensuring security, or an approach that is not so weapons-dependent.
Cynthia Cockburn, in her study of women’s peace projects in conflict zones, describes one of the women’s activities as helping each other give up “dangerous day dreams.”35 From a feminist anti-war perspective, having WMD as deterrents is a dangerous dream. The dream of perfect rationality and control which underwrites deterrence theory is a dangerous dream, since it legitimates constructing a system that only could be (relatively) safe if that perfect rationa lity and control were actually possible. Deterrence theory itself is a dangerous dream because it justifies producing and deploying WMD, thereby making their accidental or purposive use possible (and far more likely) than if they were not produced at all, nor deployed in such numbers. “Realists” are quick to point out the dangers of not having WMD for deterrence when other states have them. Feminist perspectives suggest that that danger only appears so self-evidently greater than the danger of having WMD if you discount as “soft” serious attention to the costs of development and deployment.
The belief that weapons can act as a deterrent and a solution only makes the nuclear arms race worse
Schwartz and Derber 93 -- William A. Schwartz, a professor of property law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, and Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION: WHY THE ARMS RACE DOESN’T MATTER- AND WHAT DOES, University of California Press, 1993. p. 29-30.
Nuclear Credibility:
Do We Need or Want It?
During the brief American nuclear monopoly after World War II, many believed that the United States might use nuclear weapons again in a war or political crisis. No country could retaliate, and the 1945 nuclear attacks on two defenseless Japanese cities as well as the earlier killing of hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese city dwellers with conventional weapons showed that moral considerations might not inhibit American actions.
As the Soviets developed their own nuclear arsenal, however, American strategists worried that the fear of retaliation could reduce the United States to a hobbled nuclear giant. They became obsessed with what was politely termed the "credibility" problem: how to make the world believe that American nuclear threats might actually be carried out even though the result could be the destruction of the United States. The belief that special weapons are required to solve this problem is one of the major driving forces of, and rationales for, the nuclear arms race.
In most cases, however, credibility is not problematic and does not in fact require special weapons. Should any country launch a general nuclear attack on the United States, few have ever doubted that the U.S. military would do its best to return fire in kind, regardless of the weapons available. There would be little left to lose. Here the credibility problem reduces to the technical matter of whether retaliation would be possible in the rubble and chaos. It would (as we argued in Chapter 2), if only through the vengeance of surviving nuclear weapons commanders on land or at sea. Even a limited Soviet first strike on the United States would probably kill millions of Americans; the United States would surely retaliate and would have many credible options for doing so regardless of the details of its nuclear arsenal.
AT: Hegemony
The idea of reaching a military advantage in the nuclear balance will never be achieved and exacerbates a cycle of endless nuclear build up and tyranny
Schwartz and Derber 93 -- William A. Schwartz, a professor of property law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, and Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION: WHY THE ARMS RACE DOESN’T MATTER- AND WHAT DOES, University of California Press, 1993. p. 46
Are Leaders Misinformed about Nuclear War?
One of the most basic objections to our argument is that the people in charge of nuclear weapons might not understand it. Weapons might matter, if only because people think they do and act accordingly. The realities we have described may be unimportant if irrational perceptions actually govern the decisions of real national leaders.
The nuclear establishment takes this possibility seriously. As psychologist Steven Kull shows, "perception theory" has dominated establishment thinking for years.[1] The idea that one side or the other could achieve objective, militarily useful advantages in the nuclear balance has been widely, though not totally, discredited. Yet influential theorists argue that because the Soviets and other key audiences may misperceive the meaning of new weapons, we must build them to appear strong even if they do not really make us any stronger or protect against any real threat. One version of this argument is that the Soviets mistakenly believe that nuclear war can be fought and won and that they will soon be confident of the capability to do so unless the United States takes strong actions to disabuse them of this notion. Thus if MX or Star Wars or Trident II makes the Soviets reconsider their reckless position, it must be built whether or not it has real military value. Even if the Soviets might not actually start a nuclear war, the argument goes, their confidence about winning one, should it occur, could strengthen their hand in political conflicts with the West.
Prolif = Not real
Proliferation is just constructed as a threat
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick ‘3
Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Working Paper No. 104 “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security. Sara Ruddick is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Feminist Studies at Lang College of the New School for Social Research, USA. She is the author of Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace and numerous other publications on feminist studies, just war theory, and nonviolence.
Proliferation as a Discourse
“Proliferation” is not a mere description or mirror of a phenomenon that is “out there,” but rather a very specific way of identifying and constructing a problem. “Proliferation, ” as used in Western political discourse, does not simply refer to the “multiplication” of weapons of mass destruction on the planet. Rather, it constructs some WMD as a problem, and others as unproblematic. It does so by assuming pre-existing, legitimate possessors of the weapons, implicitly not only entitled to those weapons, but to “modernize” and develop new “generations” of them as well. The “problematic” WMD are only those that “spread” into the arsenals of other, formerly non-possessor states. This is presumably the basis for the “licit/illicit” distinction in the question; it does not refer to the nature of the weapons themselves, nor even to the purposes for which they are intended – only, in the case of nuclear weapons, to who the possessor is, where “licitness” is based on the treaty-enshrined “we got there first.”
Tech Gender unique
Technocratic gender discrimination is unique from gender bias
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Discussion
Technocratic reorganization of the workplace during the past two decades has been considerable. Moreover, although technocracy rests on the assumption of exclusively technical and meritocratic imperatives, technocratic reorganization interacts with traditional workplace authority structures, which remain gendered. Although sex segregation and discrimination certainly predate technocracy, technocratic gender bias differs from previous forms in two main ways: technocratic polarization implies that "expert" and "non-expert" women face fundamentally different types of discrimination, and technocratic ideology implies that technocratic gender discrimination is heavily legitimated by science, advanced technology, and esteem for the experts.
Technocratic reorganization is having pronounced effects on gender, race, and class around the world. The polarization of the occupational sector into skilled and non-skilled jobs is paralleling and reinforcing sex and race segregation so that women and racial minorities are disproportionately found in the non-expert, deskilled jobs and white men are in the majority among expert, skilled workers (Bentson 1983; Kraft 1979; Feldberg and Glenn 1983; Morales 1983; Zimmerman 1983). This tendency is most marked in the international division of labor, where young women comprise 85-90 percent of workers in the third world's Export Processing Zones of U.S. based multinationals (Fernandez-Kelly 1983).
Discourse comes 1st - BMD
Discourse shapes the reality in which we see ballistic missile defense
Cristina Masters ‘3
“Tales of the Shield: A Feminist Reading of Ballistic Missile Defence”
Cristina Masters Doctoral Candidate Department of Political Science York University YCISS Working Paper Number 23 March 2003
Cristina Masters is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.
Temporal Aporias
The temporal aporias seem to abound in contemporary debates around ballistic missile defence. While we seemingly have displaced our collective memories in and around the ‘birth’ of missile defence, at the same time we have displaced contemporary renditions of missile defence back (in)to the future. The debates have this odd temporal dimension to them as though we are simply talking about something in the future, something that has yet to occur, whether in the near or distant future really does not matter. I say this because when we talk about whether we should or should not do something, what gets occluded, and indeed obfuscated is how in asking the questions, in naming the thing, in some ways, it already is. The ‘should we or should we not debate,’ never asks the question: how is ballistic missile defence and the desire for a protective shield already working? In saying this, I obviously do not mean in the technical or technological sense, but in the sense of how it is already working in our political imaginary, how it is already working to construct how we understand our reality, ourselves, and others in the world. Saying that ballistic missile defence is already working in our political imaginary, is suggesting that the operation of a ‘missile defence shield’ is not simply about the realisation of its material self, but significantly how it is already operating through the metaphors and images evoked in the naming (Orford 1999). Understanding the “metaphoric effect with the production of meaning itself, that is…the very life of language or thought in general”(Stellardi 2000:21). Metaphors and imagery are not merely inert devices which aid description and explanation, rather they are doing discursive work through their significations and circulations.
Analysis of the metaphorical basis of security policy can thus serve to reveal the constructed nature of international security. It is a construction of the imagination. It therefore matters a great deal who is doing the imagining, and what the implications are of the resultant image…Ultimately, the analysis of metaphor is a route to the opening up of alternatives in international security, alternatives that are rooted in the commitments of those making the choice of metaphors (Mutimer 1997:216).
This particular understanding of metaphor moves away from work on metaphors by Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1980), because their structuralist/functionalist approach read metaphors as instruments of language and discourse – as ‘governing ’ thought – rather than as themselves constitutive of social reality. Lakoff and Johnson assume a transparency and coherence to metaphors which reflect a strict intentionality on the part of the speaker, but metaphors are not always coherent, and do not always perfectly reflect what was initially intended in their usage. Part of the problem in Lakoff and Johnson’s theorisations of metaphors is the decontextualised nature in which they are understood, wherein what is missed is that the same metaphor can inscribe multiple meanings in different contexts and importantly in the same context, as we will soon see. Put simply, Kennedy (2000) argues that while Lakoff and Johnson’s “proposed theory of metaphor…appears to fit well with their chosen examples…real world examples are messier.”(254) And this is most certainly the case with missile defence and the metaphor of the shield. Thus, by reading through the metaphors and imagery implicitly evoked in discourses of ballistic missile defence “we can see how the imagery enforms the thought, and how it can operate in some ways independently of what is going on at the level of explicit… doctrine” (Lloyd 2000:28). The imagery and metaphors of missile defence, the guiding fictions, often tell more interesting stories, and these are the narratives, which I find most revealing about the politics of missile defence (28).
Discourse comes 1st – tech
Technostrategic images act as lenses and shape who we are, what we think, what actions we take, thus the reality in which we live
Peterson and Runyan, professor of political science at the University of Arizon and professor of Women’s studies at Wright State University, 1999 (V.Spike and Anne, Global Gender Issues 2 edition p 1-3
How Lenses Work
Whenever we study a topic, we do so through a lens that necessarily focuses our attention in particular ways. By filtering or “ordering” what we look at, each lens enables us to see some things in greater detail or more accurately or in better relation to certain other things. But this is unavoidable at the expense of seeing other things that are rendered out of focus— filtered out-by each particular lens.
According to Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi, various theoretical perspectives, or “images,” of international politics contain certain assumptions and lead us “to ask certain questions, seek certain types of answers, and use certain methodological tools.”’ For example, different images act as lenses and shape our assumptions about who the significant actors are (individuals? states? multinational corporations?), what their attributes are (rationality? sell-interest? power?), how social processes are categorized (politics? cooperation? dependence?), and what outcomes are desirable (peace? national security? global equity?).
The images or lenses we use have important consequences because they structure what we look for and are able to “see’ In Patrick Morgan’s words, “Our conception of [1K acts as a] map for directing our attention and distributing our efforts, and using the wrong map can lead us into a swamp instead of taking us to higher ground”2
What we look for depends a great deal on how we make sense of, or ‘order,” our experience. we learn our ordering systems in a variety of contexts. From infancy on, we are taught to make distinctions enabling us to perform appropriately within a particular culture. As college students, we are taught the distinctions appropriate to Particular disciplines (psychology, anthropology political science) and particular schools of thought within them (realism, behavioralism, liberalism, structuralism). No matter in which context we learned them, the categories and ordering frameworks shape the lenses through which we look at, think about, and make sense of the world around us. At the same time, the lenses we adopt shape our experience of the world itself because they shape what we do and how and why we do it. For example, a political science lens focuses our attention on particular categories and events (the meaning of power, democracy, or elections) in ways that variously influence our behavior (questioning authority, protesting abuse of power, or participating in electoral campaigns).
By filtering our ways of thinking about and ordering experience, the categories and images we rely on shape how we behave and thus the world we live in: They have concrete consequences. We observe this readily in the case of self-fulfilling prophecies: If we expect hostility our own behavior (acting superior, displaying Power) may elicit responses (defensive posturing, aggression) that we then interpret as “confirming" our expectations. It is in this sense that we refer to lenses and “realities” as interactive, interdependent, or mutually constituted. Lenses shape who we are, what we think, and what actions we take, thus shaping the world we live in. At the same time, the world we live in (“reality”) shapes which lenses are available to us, what we see through them, and the likelihood of our using them in Particular contexts.
In general, as long as our lenses and images seem to “work,” we keep them and build on them. Lenses simplify our thinking. Like maps, they “frame” our choices and exploration, enabling us to take advantage of knowledge already gained and to move more effectively toward our objectives. The more useful they appear to be, the more we are inclined to take them for granted and to resist making major changes in them. we forget that our particular ordering or meaning system is a choice among many alternatives. Instead, we tend to believe we are seeing “reality” as it “is” rather than as our culture or discipline or image interprets or “maps” reality. It is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable to reflect critically on our assumptions, to question their accuracy or desirability, and to explore the implications of shifting our vantage point by adopting a different lens.
Their technological discourse characterized by instrumental rationality is rigidly gendered which renders technology as solely a tool for power, potency, and prestige
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
When I think about the world of technology, I think about a world that is rigidly gendered; that is, a world that is the exclusive province of men and is governed by a form of logic that is abstract, calculable, and depersonalized. To my way of thinking, the technological universe is characterized by a type of rationality that in certain schools of thought is known as instrumental, in which the means are divorced from the ends or the ends from the means and there is a preoccupation with issues of domination and control. These are the negative images I have. I also have images that might be characterized as envious and somewhat desirous — in this respect, the technological universe is powerful, tough-minded and strong. People who have entered this universe have the goods; that is, they have something I don’t have, but I want. As a result, they are decidedly different from me — they have succeeded in gaining access to a world that remains attractively Other.
There are other domains that are similar to the world of technology. For example, sports — I place games like football and basketball in this same category — the military is another example, or the world of high finance, and I could probably go on and on. I tend to think of such worlds as phallic universes — this is my shorthand and it means something quite specific. They are worlds that systematically exclude the maternal, they are indifferent to personal needs, and they banish values such as nurturance and care to the privatized domestic world of the home. The phallic universe is characterized by a slippery amalgam of means and ends — winning is everything and yet when victory is not realized the means are quickly accorded their own triumphant status. And yet, as I’ve said above, these phallic universes also signify power, potency, and prestige and in this respect they remain a source of envy.
Alt Solves – Generic
The alternative solves – rejecting the affirmative allows for gender analysis which is key to revealing the harmful discourse surrounding the 1AC and deconstructs it’s false justifications Ray Acheson ’10
National Model United Nations (NMUN) 31 March 2010, New York City “Gender and nuclear weapons,” Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Ray Acheson is the Project Director of Reaching Critical Will. Ray is also the associate editor of the Arms Control Reporter, a reference journal that provides information and analysis on international arms control and disarmament issues. She has worked extensively with the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies
So how could we use gender analysis to promote nuclear disarmament?
Gender analysis deconstruct nuclear weapons as symbols of power and tools of empire and the antinuclear imperialism paradigm. One useful method is gender analysis, which can show that the enshrinement of nuclear weapons as an emblem of power is not a natural fact, but a social construction. Gender analysis also helps highlight the ways in which the possession and proliferation of nuclear weapons are silently underwritten and supported by an image of hegemonic masculinity, which enables us to see just how dangerous and illusory an image of security that produces.
Being aware of the gendered meanings and characterizations embedded throughout the discourse and politics of nuclear weapons helps to confront the traditionally constructed meanings and redefine terms such as ‘strength’ and ‘security’ so that they more appropriately reflect the needs of all people. This kind of awareness can help us to understand and improve how we think, talk, and act about weapons, war, and militarism in a broader sense.
Gender analysis can very effectively multiply, amplify, and deepen arguments for disarmament and question the role of men and a certain kind of masculinity that dominate the political structures that organize wars and oversee security matters. You’ll hear a lot about UN Security Council Resolution 1325 from our other speakers, which is really relevant to challenging assumptions about masculinity and power structures
Rethinking the gendered nature of technological discourse and its underpinning in international hierarchies opens space for radical change
Peterson and Runyan, professor of political science at the University of Arizon and professor of Women’s studies at Wright State University, 1999 (V.Spike and Anne, Global Gender Issues 2 edition p. 236-237, MA)
Looking at world politics through a gender-sensitive lens affords a different view of "reality."What we see is in many ways harsher than the realist image of warring states, because we also see the underside of neoliberal celebrations of the triumph of capitalism and the spread of globalization. Indeed, whereas conventional IR lenses show us an iceberg as it emerges from the sea, feminist lenses take us below the surface to see the deep inequalities that shape international hierarchies and erupt into international conflict on the surface. They also allow us to see the hidden hierarchies on which global elites on the tip of the iceberg depend to accumulate wealth and power.
If we were interested only in the surface problems that women face as a result of international hierarchies and conflict, we would recommend that women be given more resources—more land, food, clean water, health care, education, jobs, child care, reproductive rights, money, and formal political power. However, transferring resources to meet women's practical gender interests represents only a small part of what needs to be done. we must also deal with what forms the iceberg largely below the surface. As argued in this text, the production of gender dichotomies and inequalities significantly contributes to the chilly climate that freezes international hierarchies in place. These hierarchies generate the conflicts and crises of world politics.
Alt Solves – Protection Racket
The alternative can work to deconstruct the protection racket
Peterson 92
[V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered States: Feminist (re)visions of International Relations Theory”, p. 1992, p. 56, MA]
I have argued that historically interacting systems or domination (patriarchy, state making, instrumentalism, capitalism) engender structural violence: their mutually suggests that transforming the domination relations of any one—or combination—or these systems requires transforming the objectifying practices of all. Through currently dominant lenses (positivist, “realist”), this may seem an impossible task. But as the historical review or state making suggests, system wide, revolutioinary transformations have occurred before: our social relations are made not given.”
As socially constructed and frequently, contradictory systems, even “protection rackets” are vulnerable to transformation. In the current context, interacting local, national, and global crises confirm the fragility, and therefore transformational possibilities, or large stale systems—even those or long duration. We are experiencing multiple crises of legitimiation as various authorities are increasingly unable to deliver on providing protection, securing order, and/or maintaining safely. How the failure to deliver expected benefits affects people cannot be determined abstractly: at a minimum, such Failures raises legitimation questions that arc potentially transformational.
The priorities or various systems can come into conflict, exposing the dynamics or particular exploitative practices. As contradictions are revealed and confronted, identities are reshaped, with potential for new answers to who we are, to who and what we identify with, women in paid jobs l& most of their lives challenge the myth o1’ the dependent wife and expose the contradiction of idealized nuclear family models, workers in advanced industrial economies lose jobs as multinationals seek lower wage costs in less developed countries. The welfare state cannot meet the minimum needs of increasing numbers of dependents. Environmental crises respect no borders. Multiple “indirect threats”
Alt – Postpositivist
The alternative is to reject the affirmative to allow for the postpositivist deconstruction of masculine dominated dichotomies
Peterson 92
[V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered States: Feminist (re)visions of International Relations Theory”, p. 1992, p. 57-58, MA]
The identification of appropriate strategies becomes crucial: How can we most effectively move toward world security? In addressing the extent and complexity of global insecurities, I argue for a postpositivist feminist lens as the most promising orientation for the (re)visioning required.
Through a postpositivist lens, the rules of objectivist metaphysics are revealed: reductionist dichotomies are sighted and their domination dynamics exposed. Postpositivist (re)visioning deconstructs the oppositional dynamics of myriad dichotomies: mind-body, culture-nature, protector-protected, public-private, production-reproduction, reform-revolution. This (re)visioning does not deny the distinctions these dichotomies posit, but resituates them contextually: in relation to divisions of labor and identities, institutions, structures, and possibilities of systemic transformation. A postpositivist lens rejects “naturalized” constructions, whether as essentialized identities (or woman. man, nation) or depoliticized categories (the family. natural resources. contract. truth. security). Rather, postpositivism compels our attention to context and historical process, to contingency and uncertainty, to how we construct, rather than discover, our world(s). It thus denies the illusion of the “perspective-less gaze,” and the arrogance and power claims to objectivity understood as independent of bodies and contexts.
Through a postpositivist feminist lens, the rule of dichotomizing and the dichotomies it generates are gendered, the consequence of masculinist experience and standpoint. Feminist (re)visioning exposes essentialized sexual identities and their hierarchical construction at the core of interacting objectification processes. Through this lens divisions of labor are inseparable from divisions of social identity; as historically constructed, these have relied upon an essentializing or masculine-feminine and on the deployment of that “naturalized” hierarchy as justification for interrelated, though differently embodied, domination relations, as postpositivists expose dichotomies generally, feminists extend that critique to the cultural forms dichotomies have historically taken, exposing their gendered dynamics, their politics. Feminism and postpostitivism are similar in their critiques of dominating ideologies, objectivist metaphysics, and the constitution of body/power/knowledge. But our critical and transformational commitments also move us to situate knowledge claims in order to "become answerable for what we learn how to see."
AT: Perm
Tech talk in all instances forces participants outside the discursive realm pretend to understand technocratic language and reasoning which only serves to propagate the harmful discourse
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
The effect of this closed, yet mantric technocratic discourse is social passivity characterised by a feeling that one can only conform to overwhelming and immutable forces: ‘[i]nstead of giving [people] a new sense of power, the explanation gives comfort to passivity - particularly public passivity - faced with reigning ideologies’ [12, 54 - 55]. The question we have not attempted to answer in this paper is how the technocratic discourse of globalisation in particular is so effectively propagated. From an informed perspective however, it seems clear that those discourse communities which, by necessity, must directly engage with technocracy must do so within the limited discursive possibilities available within the discourse we have described. Those having to do so include, most notably, the media; non-government organisations (NGOs) who perform social and environmental functions in cooperation with government agencies; and businesses. By entering into the technocrats’ discursive realm, participants are required to “understand” - or at least appear to understand - technocratic language and reasoning. In this way, technocratic discourse is propagated through and by these organisations. In adopting the mantric formulas, the political axioms remain immutable, quarantined from other infecting discourses with different world views and different ethical orientations.
**BMD DISCOURSE BAD
MPX – Distancing
Be skeptical of their authors technostrategic discourse because it reaffirms the masculine ‘truths’ of BMD and allows defense intellectuals to be removed from the reality of what they’re talking about, and from the realities they create through their discourse
Cristina Masters ‘3
“Tales of the Shield: A Feminist Reading of Ballistic Missile Defence”
Cristina Masters Doctoral Candidate Department of Political Science York University YCISS Working Paper Number 23 March 2003
Cristina Masters is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.
With specific reference to nuclear weapons and their defence, Carol Cohn (1987a) refers to this specialised language as technostrategic discourse. The term ‘technostrategic’ is used to “indicate the degree to which nuclear strategic language and thinking are imbued with, indeed constructed out of modes of thinking that are associated with technology.”(6n) This specialised discourse however, has also been deeply embedded in larger discourses of gender, sexuality, and identity, and the ‘vision of reality’ inscribed in technostrategic discourse is decidedly heterosexual and masculine – “White men in ties discussing missile size”(Cohn 1987a:692). To be sure, the specialised language of missile defence is not necessarily instrumentally conceived; it was not produced with the intention to exclude, sexualise, or masculinise talk of missiles and defence, even though this has undoubtedly been the very effect of these discursive practices. Instead, as Carol Cohn suggests, this discourse has taken on this particular configuration because in order to talk about nuclear weapons, both in their use and protection, necessitates a radical removal from the very reality of the talk, because to talk about the ‘real’ realities of nuclear weapons would fundamentally undermine one’s ability to speak of missile defence in any dispassionate way. As Cohn (1987b) writes:
What [technostrategic discourse] reveals is a whole series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that make it possible to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incinerations of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation – all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed for the reality of what one is talking about, and from the realities one is creating through the discourse. (24)
To reflect on how gender and sexuality are inscribed by and in missile defence language, we need only refer back to the selected glossary of terms, wherein the imagery and metaphor of the phallus figures prominently in this institutionalised discourse. References to ‘patting the bomb,’ ‘putting the nicest missile into the nicest hole,’ ‘penetration,’ ‘enabling devices,’ ‘thrust-to-weight ratios,’ missile ‘warheads,’ ‘hardness,’ percentage of megatonnage as ‘orgasmic whump,’ and ‘erector’ platforms, to name but a few, not only represent, but also are reproductive of gendered and sexualised identities, but more specifically the constitution of ‘homoerotic’ heterosexual masculinity with missiles as the referent object (Cohn 1987a: 692-6; Cohn 1987b: 24). This discourse (re)produces and (re)articulates ‘truths’ about masculinity and sexuality through the imagery and metaphors evoked in the language, wherein weapons have become marked as one of the key sites upon which hegemonic heterosexual masculinity has been intimately inscribed. In the case of the United States, its military prowess is indeed the very representation of its hegemonic identity.
MPX – Biopolitics
Ballistic missile defense expands American biopolitics
Cristina Masters ‘3
“Tales of the Shield: A Feminist Reading of Ballistic Missile Defence”
Cristina Masters Doctoral Candidate Department of Political Science York University YCISS Working Paper Number 23 March 2003
Cristina Masters is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.
So how does shield as covering up and concealment operate in our political imaginary of BMD? I want to suggest that, in this instance, the shield reveals a crucial dimension of the politics of missile defence so far absent in the narrative, and that is the politics of identity, or more to the point, identity insecurity. It is at this moment that what is actually being protected by BMD becomes of the utmost significance. Ballistic missile defence is specifically about protecting some weapons from other weapons with more weapons, and not specifically, or at all about protecting people, but rather the projection/protection of the American body politic. The referent object of BMD is the American nuclear arsenal, a nuclear arsenal that seemingly now is insufficient to provide protection for the American body politic. The irony of this is utterly profound because if we reflect back on cold war discourses nuclear weapons were constituted as the embodiment, indeed the very representation of American hegemonic masculine identity, but an identity now so obviously in crisis by its very need and desire for protection and concealment
**“TECH TALK” BAD
MPX – Distancing
The affirmative language has already mastered the “tech talk” which removes them from the reality of nuclear war
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Although I was startled by the combination of dry abstraction and counter-intuitive imagery that characterizes the language of defense intellectuals, my attention and energy were quickly focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the articulation of acronyms.
Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly as utilitarian. They allow you to write or speak faster. They act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving all others both uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate.
But, being at the Center, hearing the defense analysts use the acronyms, and then watching as I and others in the group started to fling acronyms around in our conversation revealed some additional, unexpected dimensions.
First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms can be very sexy. A small supersonic rocket "designed to penetrate any Soviet air defense" is called a SRAM (for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise missiles are not referred to as SLCMs, but "slick'ems." Ground-launched cruise missiles are "glick'ems." Air-launched cruise missiles are not sexy but rnagical—"akherns" (ALCMs) replete with the illusion of turning base metals into gold.
TACAMO, the acronym used to refer to the planes designed to provide communications links to submarines, stands for "take charge and move out." The image seems closely related to the nicknames given to the new guidance systems for "smart weapons"—"shoot and scoot" or "fire and forget."
Other acronyms work in other ways. The plane in which the president supposedly will be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving intelligence and issuing commands for the next bombing, is referred to as "kneecap" (for NEACP—National Emergency Airborne Command Post). The edge of derision suggested in referring to it as -kneecap" mirrors the edge of derision implied when it is talked about at all, since few believe that the president really would have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would be working if he were in it, and some might go so far as to question the usefulness of his being able to direct an extended nuclear war from his kneecap even if it were feasible. (I never heard the morality of this idea addressed.) But it seems to me that speaking about it with that edge of derision is exactly what allows it to be spoken about and seriously discussed at all. It is the very ability to make fun of a concept that makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright.
In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy. You can throw them around in rapid-fire succession. They are quick, clean, light; they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might just interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them.
I am not describing a phenomenon experienced only by the perverse, although the phenomenon itself may be perverse indeed. Nearly everyone I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words. It mattered little whether we were lecturers or students, hawks or doves, men or women—we all learned it, and we all spoke it. Some of us may have spoken with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless.
Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the know. It is a glow that is a significant part of learning about nuclear weaponry. Few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows with them, perhaps even be one yourself.
That feeling, of course, does not come solely from the language. The whole set-up of the summer program itself, for example, communicated the allures of power and the benefits of white male privileges. We were provided with luxurious accommodations, complete with young black women who came in to clean up after us each day; generous funding paid not only our transportation and food but also a large honorarium for attending; we met in lavishly appointed classrooms and lounges. Access to excellent athletic facilities was guaranteed by a "Temporary Privilege Card," which seemed to me to sum up the essence of the experience. Perhaps most important of all were the endless allusions by our lecturers to "what I told John [Kennedy]" and "and then Henry [Kissinger} said," or the lunches where we could sit next to a prominent political figure and listen to Washington gossip.
A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of learning the language is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. The experience of mastering the words infuses your relation to the material. You can get so good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as though the whole thing is under control. Learning the language gives a sense of what I would call cognitive mastery; the feeling of mastery of technology that is finally not controllable but is instead powerful beyond human comprehension, powerful in a way that stretches and even thrills the imagination.
The more conversations I participated in using this language, the less frightened I was of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, I believe, is that the process of learning the language is itself a part of what removes you from the reality of nuclear war.
I entered a world where people spoke what amounted to a foreign language, a language I had to learn if we were to communicate with one another. So I became engaged in the challenge of it—of decoding the acronyms and figuring out which were the proper verbs to use. My focus was on the task of solving the puzzles, developing language competency—not on the weapons and wars behind the words. Although my interest was in thinking about nuclear war and its prevention, my energy was elsewhere.
The affirmative’s technostrategic discourse allows them to distance themselves from the reality of devastation and destruction that is a direct consequence of nuclear war, domesticating the forces of nuclear destruction makes people more likely to use them
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
In a different but related domain, Carol Cohn (1987), a feminist scholar and peace activist, writes about the discursive culture of defense intellectuals — those individuals who articulate the theory that both informs and legitimates America’s nuclear arms policies. Cohn was one of a group of college teachers who attended a summer workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine, and arms control. Her involvement in the summer institute led her to undertake an analysis of the language of this culture — a language she calls technostrategic. Cohn not only documents the obvious and expected aspects of this culture, such as the use of phallic and gender-laden imagery (long discussions took place on the relative value of different “penetration aids” or how to “get more bang for your buck”), but she also analyzes the more subtle and less transparent role that the language of strategic defense analysts plays in masking the reality of nuclear death and devastation. As Cohn writes: In the ever-friendly world of nuclear weaponry, enemies “exchange” warheads; one missile “takes out” another; weapons “marry up”; “coupling” is sometimes used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms of warning and response, or to the psychopolitical links between strategic (intercontinental) and theater (European-based) weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile’s nuclear warheads land is known as a “footprint.” These nuclear explosives are not dropped; a “bus” “delivers” them. (1987, p. 698)
Cohn’s point is that this kind of talk serves to domesticate and tame the forces of nuclear destruction. The metaphors that these men use to characterize their work, minimize the horrific and deadly nature of the weapons they describe — “they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond what the mind can encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery over the unmasterable” (p. 698). As she became more enmeshed in the language of the defense community, Cohn describes her own experience of losing site of the reality which she had originally come to study — it was no longer possible for her to hold onto the images of devastation and destruction that most of us associate with nuclear war. Cohn’s research is a poignant example of the ways in which gender, language, and technology can combine to shape and inform the cultural practices of a community of individuals. Her work illustrates, in turn, the ways in which cultural practices allow certain patterns of meaning to flourish while excluding or banishing others. In our own research on gender and technology, we were interested in investigating how the technological cultures within which women worked would impact on the ways in which they would appropriate and make meaning out of different areas of technological expertise. As Teresa de Lauretis (1986) has stated, “the relation of experience to discourse is what is at issue in the definition of feminism” (p. 5).
MPX – Conformity
Technocratic discourse breeds conformism which is a facet of technological rationality that translates itself into social behavior
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
We have shown how this is manifested in specific lexico-grammatical forms, and in semantic circularity. The discourse operates by incorporating highly contestable neoclassical and neo-liberal assumptions as foundational axioms, and by reifying nominalised abstractions that construe the world in particular ways that make it seem pointless to challenge. In technocratic discourse, human agency is virtually non-existent beyond complying with the demands of the ‘new world order’ [48].
We argue that the emergence of technocratic discourse is politically significant because it advances the interests, to the point of hegemony, of economically dominant countries, transnational corporations, and supranational legislative bodies. By abridging and compressing meaning, technocratic discourse closes other possible meanings of the phenomenon being discussed, engendering a type of ‘conformism which is a facet of technological rationality translated into social behaviour’ [16, 77]. Of course, a technological rationale for action of any sort is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness [19, 121].
MPX – Exclusionary
The affirmatives technostrategic discourse is exclusionary and forces us to either engage in the discourse or be dismissed for our simplemindedness
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business of defense planning, I had to start asking more questions. At first, although I was tempted to use my newly acquired proficiency in te,chnostrategic jargon, I vowed to speak English. I had long believed that one of
the most important functions of an expert language is exclusion—the denial of a voice to those outside the professional community.' I wanted to see whether a well-informed person could speak English and still carry on a knowledgeable conversation.
What I found was that no matter how well-informed or complex my questions were, if I spoke English rather than expert jargon, the men
responded to me as though I were ignorant, simpleminded, or both. It did not appear to occur to anyone that I might actually be choosing not to speak their language.
A strong distaste for being patronized and dismissed made my experiment in English short-lived. I adapted my everyday speech to the vocabulary of strategic analysis. I spoke of "escalation dominance," "preemptive strikes," and, one of my favorites, "subholocaust engagements," Using the right phrases opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it.
I found, however, that the better I got at engaging in this discourse, the more impossible it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values.
I could adopt the language and gain a wealth of new concepts and reasoning
strategies—but at the same time as the language gave me access to things I had been unable to speak about before, it radically excluded others. I could not use the language to express my concerns because it was physically impossible. This language does not allow certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed.
To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come is "strategic stability," a term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems—not the political,
social, economic, and psychological conditions implied by the word "peace." Not only is there no word signifying peace in this discourse, but
the word "peace" itself cannot be used. To speak it is immediately to brand oneself as a soft-headed activist instead of an expert, a professional to be taken seriously.
The dominative nature of technocratic discourse prohibits the possibility of public debate
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
Technocratic language draws interdiscursively from scientific discourse, and from technological discourse. It also draws historically from the lexico-grammars of managerialism, the military, and of religion, in particular, that of the scholastics [11]. Technocratic discourse appears to be objective and rational because of its pseudoscientific appearance. But it is precisely the opposite in most cases. Such a discourse, then, deserves considerable attention because of its potentially profound impact and widespread use. Today, technocratic discourse suffuses the policy statements of what were formerly recognisable as left- and right-wing parties, but which are recognisable as such no longer, precisely because of their technocratic language. Its use thereby has eliminated dialectical political encounters, and, consequently, the possibility for public debate on important matters of social policy [12;13, 10;5]
MPX – Preemptive Strikes
Thinking of nuclear weapons as a means of security makes the US secure in its ability to preemptively strike another country and vice versa the perception of US security makes other countries want to preemptively strike the US
Schwartz and Derber 93 -- William A. Schwartz, a professor of property law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, and Charles Derber, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, THE NUCLEAR SEDUCTION: WHY THE ARMS RACE DOESN’T MATTER- AND WHAT DOES, University of California Press, 1993. p. 47
In our view, the left exhibits its own version of perception theory in arguing that even if the Pentagon's new weapons do not actually give the United States a first-strike option, the generals, the national security adviser, and the president might not recognize this reality. With MX, Trident II, and the Stealth bomber in hand, they might foolishly press the button under the delusion that victory is finally possible. Howard Moreland, for example, acknowledges that "to launch a first strike would be risking suicide." But he argues that since "the only discernible military purpose of the nuclear arms race in the 1980's is to acquire a first-strike capability or to prevent the enemy from acquiring one," leaders apparently do not understand the risk.[3]
U.S. weapons programs, then, are taken as a signal of a U.S. perception that a successful first strike may be achievable. The problem therefore lies not in MX and Trident II, which do little to change meaningful U.S. nuclear capabilities, but in the leadership's misperception of them. The Soviets may also be misinformed. If they come to believe that the U.S. arsenal poses a real threat of disarming them—or that American leaders believe it does—then in the heat of a crisis they might preempt, desperately and senselessly using their weapons rather than risk losing them.
As we have seen, others fear that nuclear innovations at the low end of the destructive spectrum, such as the neutron bomb, could promote the dangerous misperception that nuclear war can be fought and contained like conventional war. Michael Klare, for example, worries that if, irrationally, the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons faded in leaders' minds, "the inhibition against nuclear escalation would decrease, and the risk of global annihilation would skyrocket."[4]
MPX – Masculine
Technology is a symbol. The affirmative’s use of technology embodies the rationalist tradition associated with masculinity
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
Background
We began this research with certain theoretical suppositions about the nature of technological objects. Technological objects are symbolic and as such they are over-determined. The task of decoding the symbolic nature of technologies is a hermeneutic endeavor that involves an intellectual process of deciphering and uncovering hidden or latent meanings (Ricoeur, 1970). The computer serves as an interesting case in point.
Like all symbolic objects, computers have meanings attached to them that are both manifest and latent, and perhaps more than any other object on the contemporary horizon computers have been used to both illustrate and embody different aspects of human potential and human imagination. Computer scientists working in the area of artificial intelligence attempt to breath life into technology by endowing machines with aspects of human intelligence; the prototypic example of this being the intelligent chessplaying computer.3
In his research on “The Army and the Microworld,” Paul Edwards (1990) makes the point that “Computer work — programming, computer engineering, systems analysis — is more than a job. It is a major cultural practice, a large-scale social form that has created and reinforced modes of thinking, systems of interaction, and ideologies of social control” (p. 102). As part of a larger cultural discourse, the computer and, increasingly, information technologies in general, embody a kind of hyper-rationality that is privileged in our culture as a whole. The work of the computer scientist takes place within a rule-bound, logical universe that is freed from the constraints and messiness of day-to-day life. The culture of computer science is thought of as rigorous, intellectually demanding, and requiring “hard” knowledge to both participate and succeed in. As Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert (1990) note, “Both popular and technical culture have constructed computation as the ultimate embodiment of the abstract and the formal.” And indeed, the rationalist tradition within which the work of the computer scientist is embedded, has long been associated with maleness and masculinity — with a kind of hard mastery that is opposed to the softer, more interpersonally oriented world of women (Cohn, 1990; Edwards, 1990; Keller, 1985; Turkle, 1984, 1988, 1990). In this sense, then, the computer is the ultimate technological object and it embodies in exaggerated fashion those aspects of technology which are most phallic in nature.
The affirmative’s technocratic ideology works to reinforce technocratic ‘masculine’ traits
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Technocratic ideology therefore exaggerates actual aspects of technocracy: the fact that technical expertise and advanced technology have become increasingly salient and important. As with previous ideologies of organizational control, technocratic ideology alleges objectivity and meritocracy: that technical expertise and technology are independent of political or economic interests. To challenge technocratic reorganization is therefore construed as irrational or as incompetent.
Technocratic ideology is gendered in that technical expertise and abstract conceptual knowledge are socially defined as more "masculine" traits. Socially desirable traits have historically been defined as masculine: precapitalist theocracy declared men to be closer to God; industrialization exalted male physical strength; bureaucracy rests on a masculine ethos of predictable, rational behavior (Kanter 1977; Ferguson 1984). Technocratic ideology emphasizes gender stereotypes that define femininity as antithetical to technocratic norms: subjective, emotional, irrational, unscientific, and technically incompetent (Bourdieu 1984; Glennon 1979; Hacker 1983; Keller 1985; Lowe and Hubbard 1983). From her study of the impact of computerization in 11 different workplaces, Cockburn (1987:5, 8) concludes: How has hegemonic masculine ideology dealt with the shift of technology from heavy, dirty and dangerous (electromechanicalt) echnology, to light, clean and safe (electronic) technology, given that masculinity was so clearly associated with the former qualities and femininity with the latter? The ideology has done a neat "about turn." The new technology is associated with logic and intellect and these in turn with men and masculinity. The complementarity is preserved by associating women and femininity with irrationality and physicality.
MPX - ignores SQ suffering
The aff’s “tech talk” ignores the communicative and relational capacity of technology – rendering it useless to people suffering in the SQ
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
The Women Pleasure in Technology’s Communicative Potential
I’m excited about the potential that it opens up for people. I mean having the video connection between our two sites was really exciting to me — it was incredibly thrilling to me. I thought that the way that it allowed people to be brought together that wouldn’t have been otherwise, was fantastic. And I still feel that way about it, a lot, so I’m certainly excited about what it can offer. And totally intrigued by the fact that often it offers you something that you didn’t anticipate. (42, computer scientist, corporate research and development center) One of the things I really liked doing, and that’s probably why I transferred, actually, was the space stuff...working on building networks that would interface people. I worked on one project... for the space station people, to manage all their information. And that was really exciting, because we were designing a new network, we were going across the country, we were hooking all the networks together - I think the wide area networks and interaction with other people always were exciting to me... (27, systems engineer, government research and development center) The communications stuff I do, the fact that I can be talking with people around the world easily, and the sort of chance interactions I have with people are quite exciting. (40, computer scientist, software company) The three women who speak here reference the potential of the technology, and they locate this potential in what it can open up for people. What is compelling about the computer-based technologies with which they work are the possibilities for communication and exchange between people that they can facilitate. Words like exciting, thrilling, and fantastic are used to describe the technologies’ capacity to bring people together. Metaphors that have to do with creating and fostering connections are also used to describe their enjoyment in their work: building, interfacing, and hooking are the capacities of the technology that are talked about. Encountering the unexpected is also a source of pleasure, particularly when it leads to an unanticipated exchange between individuals.
The portrait that these women paint is expansive in tone, and we are left with an image of technology as possibility — as something that can expand and enhance the range of communicative activities among people. There is a surprising absence of “tech talk” — there is no mention of file transfer protocols, satellite hook-ups, internet access, or TCP/IP connections, or any number of terms that role off people’s tongues when they are talking about telecommunications technologies.5 Rather than calling attention to their knowledge of complicated and sophisticated technical undertakings, these women choose to emphasize the communicative and relational capacity of the technology.
MPX – structural inequality
“tech talk”-even in the context of debate- only maintains structural inequality
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
Technocratic discourse is most clearly characterised by the way it represents itself: although it has a clearly hegemonic function, it consciously presents itself as ‘“above the fray”, as a supplier of “facts”, neutral and objective, free of all interests and values except truth, which all parties must take into account in deciding policy’ [15, 70]. It does so by adopting a form of scientificity that is a mere parody of science, and by representing its epistemic claims - often tacit - as objective knowledge [15, 69]. Even though technocratic deliberations usually end in recommended social policies, and, ultimately, in implementing those policies, it eschews any notion that such policies operationalise value systems that impact differentially on people thereby producing or maintaining structural inequality. However, technocratic discourses have quite well-defined value systems, implicit ones, that serve the dominant economic interests of the corporatist and “managerial” classes [11] .
MPX – Gender norms
Technocratic organizations strengthen micropolitical gender norms
Beverly H. Burris ’89
Source: Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 165-180, “Technocracy and Gender in the Workplace”
Beverly H. Burris is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico.
Expertise as Authority
In technocratic organizations, demonstrated expertise and credential certification tend to become more important than rank position as the basic source of legitimate authority. In contrast to the more personalized managerial authority characteristic of bureaucracy, derived from seniority and promotion from within, technocratic authority rests on the allegedly neutral decision making ability derived from expertise. Although such expertise might be expected to be gender neutral, in fact, new types of gender-laden politicking have emerged in work organizations.
In organizations where rank authority is not yet based on technical expertise and where managers thus have less technical knowledge than their staffs, conflict has been found to be a frequent occurrence. Kraft (1977:76ff.), for instance, in a study of computer programmers and "software production" found that managers with less expertise had trouble maintaining authority over computer programmers and that a trend towards assigning technical and managerial functions to the same person was apparent; Hodson (1988:269ff.) found that managerial incompetence was one of the most salient grievances among high-tech workers and engineers and that lack of understanding of the "intricacies of high-tech production" and being "overly concerned with rules, bureaucratically measurable outcomes, and marketing" were the frequent basis for such claims (see also Gouldner 1979:50ff.; Larson 1977:184ff.).
As technical and managerial functions converge, such conflicts between technical experts and managers will tend to subside (Ilchman 1969; Kraft 1977); and as technocratic organization becomes more fully consolidated, managers will increasingly need technical expertise, external credentials, and managerial expertise in order to maintain legitimacy. Technical expertise is becoming an important precondition for traditional managerial functions: supervision, planning, marketing. Computerized systems of "management science" and computer modeling to enhance decision making are becoming prevalent (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Given the increased emphasis on expertise as the basis of authority, new types of politicking centered around "conspicuous expertise" become apparent in technocratic organizations (Burris 1986). Kanter (1983:55) found that in the high-tech firms she studied "traditional authority virtually disappears; managers must instead persuade, influence, or convince." Formerly, successful bureaucratic careers depended "on who you know, not what you know."
Technocratic careers may depend more on "not what you know, but how well you can appear knowledgeable." Some of the workers whom Zuboff (1988:259) interviewed, for instance, said, "The people who get the highest rankings do the most talking, but it can be a real snow job," and "you tend to get rewarded if you are a neat dresser or if you make it sound like you did great." Another asset in this expertise politicking can be having the "right" credentials (Burris 1983; Alvesson 1987:226).
As such expertise becomes more important, new types of gender politicking emerge. Hirschhorn (1984) found that technocratic work settings where formal authority is weakened tend to be characterized by the "micropolitics" of small group interaction. Leadership is derived from such sources as "information, expertise, connections, energy, creativity, and charisma" (Hirschhorn 1984:146). Given the predominance of men in expert sectors, imbalances in numbers and inequities of power imply that such micropolitics will be gender laden. Moreover, the relaxation of bureaucratic rules and rank authority may make women vulnerable to personalized subordination, despite the assumption that equality and meritocracy operate within expert task forces. Josefowitz (1983) found that women's contributions to group discussions are more likely not to be heard or to be attributed to a male participant. Gallese (1985) found that even women with elite credentials have difficulty being accepted into the higher echelons of corporate life (see also Kanter 1977; Murphree 1984).
MPX – Prolif
The Masculine discourse surrounding nuclear weapons ensures failure for all future disarmament efforts
Ray Acheson ’10
National Model United Nations (NMUN) 31 March 2010, New York City “Gender and nuclear weapons,” Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
Ray Acheson is the Project Director of Reaching Critical Will. Ray is also the associate editor of the Arms Control Reporter, a reference journal that provides information and analysis on international arms control and disarmament issues. She has worked extensively with the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies
Okay, so we have some connections between gender conceptions of masculinity and nuclear
weapons. How is this relevant?
It’s relevant because:
1) the relationship between nuclear weapons as a symbol of masculine strength make it harder to open up discussions about disarmament. Proponents of abolishing nuclear weapons are put down as unrealistic and/or weak. I can assure you, as someone who sits in UN meetings about nuclear weapons and who constantly engages with the full political spectrum on this issue, these weapons are still seen as an instrument of power and it’s very hard to get past this to start talking about how we can get rid of them.
2) related to this, as a symbol of strength, nuclear weapons are attractive to others. They are seen as the platinum credit card of state security and as giving admission to a very elite club of powerful states. The fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have nuclear weapons is no coincidence. The association of masculinity to power, the association of nuclear weapons to power, the association of masculinity and nuclear weapons, all this gets jumbled up and facilitates proliferation.
MPX – Understanding
Techonstrategic distorts the 1AC
Jean Hollis Weber ‘2
“Gender-neutral technical writing” 5/12
Jean Hollis Weber is a science and technology editor and writer
Why should technical writers care about gender-neutral writing? The answer is simple: Technical communication’s goal is to convey information to an audience, in a form that the audience can understand and use. We should avoid, if possible, anything that interferes with clear communication. If part of our audience is insulted (or offended, irritated, confused, or misled) or stumbles over the way we express ourselves, that reaction will interfere with the reception and understanding of our message.
MPX – Arms Race
Metaphors which equate political and military power with sexual potency and masculinity incentivizes the acquisition of nuclear weapons as a symbol of state security
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick ‘3
Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Working Paper No. 104 “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security. Sara Ruddick is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Feminist Studies at Lang College of the New School for Social Research, USA. She is the author of Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace and numerous other publications on feminist studies, just war theory, and nonviolence.
We argue that gendered terms and images are an integral part of the ways national security issues are thought about and represented – and that it matters. During the Gulf War, for example, the mass media speculated whether George Bush had finally “beat the wimp factor.” When in the spring of 1998 India exploded five nuclear devices, Hind u nationalist leader Balasaheb Thackeray explained “we had to prove that we are not eunuchs.” An Indian newspaper cartoon “depicted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee propping up his coalition government with a nuclear bomb. ‘Made with Viagra,’ the captio n read.”41
Feminists argue that these images are not trivial, but instead deserve analysis. Metaphors which equate political and military power with sexual potency and masculinity serve to both shape and limit the ways in which national security is conceptualized.42 Political actors incorporate sexual metaphors in their representations of nuclear weapons as a way to mobilize gendered associations and symbols in creating assent, excitement, support for, and identification with the weapons and their own political regime. Moreover, gendered metaphor is not only an integral part of accomplishing domestic power aims. The use of these metaphors also appropriates the test of a nuclear weapon into the occasion for reinforcing patriarchal gender relations.
That a nation wishing to stake a claim to being a world power (or a regional one) should choose nuclear weapons as its medium for doing so is often seen as “natural”: the more advanced military destructive capacity you have, the more powerful you are. The “fact” that nuclear weapons would be the coin of the realm in establishing a hierarchy of state power is fundamentally unremarked, unanalyzed, taken for granted by most (nonfeminist) analysts. Some anti-war feminists, by contrast, have looked with a historical and post-colonial eye, and seen nuclear weapons’ enshrinement of as the emblem of power not as a natural fact, but as a social one, produced by the actions of states. They argue that when the United States, with the most powerful economy and conventional military in the world, acts as though its power and security are guaranteed only by a large nuclear arsenal, it creates a context in which nuclear weapons become the ultimate necessity for and symbol of state security. And when the US or any other nuclear power works hard to ensure that other states don’t obtain nuclear weapons, it is creating a context in which nuclear weapons become the ultimate arbiter of political power.4
**DEFENSE DISCOURSE BAD
MPX – Distancing
Defense intellectuals only think in terms technocracy and use abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to respond with the realities of nuclear use
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
State I: Listening
Clean bombs and dean language
Entering the world of defense intellectuals was a bizarre experience—bizarre because it is a world where men spend their days calmly and matter-of-factly discussing nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear war. The discussions are carefully and intricately reasoned, occurring seemingly without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage—in fact, there seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of "first strikes," "counterforce exchanges,- and "limited nuclear war,- or as they debate the comparative values of a "minimum deterrent posture" versus a "nuclear war-fighting capability."
Yet what is striking about the men themselves is not, as the content of their conversations might suggest, their cold-bloodedness. Rather, it is that they are a group of men unusually endowed with charm, humor, intelligence, concern, and decency. Reader, I liked them. At least, I liked many of them. The attempt to understand how such men could contribute to an endeavor that I see as so fundamentally destructive became a continuing obsession for me, a lens through which! came to examine all of my experiences in their world.
In this early stage, I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words.
I have coined the term "technostrategic- to represent the intertwined, inextricable nature of technological and nuclear strategic thinking. The first reason is that strategic thinking seems to change in direct response to technological changes, rather than political thinking, or some independent paradigms that might he isolated as -strategic (On this point, see Lord Solly Zuckerman, Nueleaf littenons and Reakty [New York: Viking Press, 1982]). Even more important, strategic theory not only depends on and changes in response to technological objects, it is also based on a kind of thinking, a way of looking at problems—formal, mathematical modeling, systems analysis, game theory, linear programming—that are part of technology itself So I use the term "technostrategic" to indicate the degree to which nuclear strategic language and thinking are imbued with, indeed constructed out of, modes of thinking that are associated with technology.
Defense intellectuals use sexual imagery to minimize the seriousness of the deadly consequences of military endeavors
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Given the degree to which it suffuses their world, that defense intellectuals themselves use a lot of sexual imagery does not seem especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. For me, the interesting issue is not so much the imagery's psychodynamic origins, as how it functions. How does it serve to make it possible for strategic planners and other defense intellectuals to do their macabre work? How does it function in their construction of a work world that feels tenable? Several stories illustrate the complexity.
During the summer program, a group of us visited the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are homeported and the General Dynamics Electric Boat boatyards where a new Trident submarine was being constructed. At one point during the trip we took a tour of a nuclear powered submarine. When we reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the missile?
The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD the North American Aerospace Defense Command). On the way back, our plane went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got to pat a B-1.
What is all this "patting"? What are men doing when they "pat" these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own.
But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates something of the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language, it also has another side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small, cute, and harmless—not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears.
Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be construed as a deadly serious display of the connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. At the same time, it can also be heard as a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences. A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing contest—you gotta expect them to use everything they've got." What does this image say? Most obviously, that this is all about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger. But at the same time, the image diminishes the contest and its outcomes, by representing it as an act of boyish mischief ,Fathers, sons, and virgins
*****Aff
Experts Good
Experts are self-checking – they can screen out bias and fraudulent hypotheses
Brown, 06 professor of physiology at West Virginia University (Paul, Notes from a Dying Planet, p. xv)
Scientists, and scholars in general, have devised an approach to learning about the world which works very well. Curiously, it’s based on the assumption that absolute certainty cannot be attained about anything. We can frame hypotheses about what causes what, preferably using unambiguous mathematical equations, but we can never prove them to be right all the time, under all circumstances. Through careful observation, preferably using numbers, we can disprove wrong hypotheses and gradually zero in on ones which stand up to all our tests, which are therefore more likely to be right. These hypotheses we call theories, and they’re the highest form of scientific certainty. Disciplined scholars have also devised a mechanism for self-policing called peer review, which helps weed out the fraudulent and the foolish. It’s not foolproof, but it works better than other methods. Surely the meticulously obtained information and painstakingly constructed theories of these dedicated individuals merit our serious attention.
Expertism Good – Citing experts doesn’t glorify them as god-like
Turner 1
Stephen, Professor of Philosophy @ Florida, Social Studies of Science, 2001, February, Sage Publications
The parallel claim that what counts as ‘expert’ is conventional, mutable and shifting, and that people are persuaded of claims to expertise through mutable, shifting conventions does not make the decisions to accept or reject the authority of experts less than reasonable in the sense appropriate to liberal discussion. To grant a role to expert knowledge does not require us to accept the immaculate conception of expertise. The lesson of the second kind of social constructionism is that these conditions, the conditions of mutability – and not some sort of analogue to Habermas’s ideal-speech situation – are the conditions under which scientific consensus itself occurs, and that there is no alternative. This is a negative message, but nevertheless an important one, in that it excludes a certain kind of utopianism about expertise and its ‘control’ by some sort of higher reason. Excluding this kind of utopianism is a kind of answer to the issues with which we began. Expertise is a deep problem for liberal theory only if we imagine that there is some sort of standard of higher reason against which the banal process of judging experts as plumbers can be held, and if there is not, it is a deep problem for democratic theory only if this banal process is beyond the capacity of ordinary people.
AT: Discourse First
Discussion of technical nuclear strategy is inevitable - their attempts to silence nuclear discourse doesn't solve the problem, it just makes it invisible - this prevents critical response
Chaloupka '92 William Chaloupka, Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom, 1992, p. 9-10
Both Derrida’s insight and Schwenger’s anecdote invite the opening of a whole realm of oppositional activity, of which only a few examples now exist. The premise of this genre (“speaking unspeakables”), as Derrida claims, may have been best realized before the nuclear era, in the literary texts of Mallarmé, Kafka, or Joyce. But there have been contemporary attempts that nuclear criticism could address.26 One could imagine a comparison, for example, of two highly publicized television films of the Reagan era, “The Day After” and the right-wing response to it, “Amer¬ika.” The level and ferocity of the response suggest that “The Day After” broke a taboo. “Amerika” charges weakness, appeasement, and even col¬laboration, but these charges so completely miss their target that we search for a better interpretation. Perhaps “The Day After” transgressed in a special way, and the only available way of responding was the arcane code of anticommunism. The actual taboo it broke, it broke by speaking at all. At the same time, the activity of finding new ways to read (literary or cinematic) texts about nukes must relate to the broader project of empowering responses if such activity is to fit within the antinuclear schema I am discussing. Leaping over hypothetical psychological diagnoses to speak politically, such a development is not so hard to imagine. “Speaking the unspeakable” has never been a happy entry into activism. Nuclear opponents have adopted any number of rhetorical strategies for overcoming this obstacle. They argue that this “unspeakability” denotes an importance so huge that we must dissolve the reticence and disgust that is our “first reaction.” Or, alternatively, they dissolve their political position into a therapeutic one, implying that the contemporary citizen would be healthier and less conflicted if she would admit and confront the nuclear demon. In either case, the political use of unspeakability produces a paradoxical stance at odds with the naturalism of the survivalist, species-interest position. This unacknowledged (unacknowledgeable) taste for paradox goes even a step further. Having bound themselves in multiple, endlessly and effortlessly proliferating dilemmas, nuclear opponents then announce that it is their goal to impose the condition of “unspeakability” on nuclear managers. The solution to the paradox of nuclear strategy is to silence strategists, such as Caspar Weinberger, who dare to speak of limited nuclear war. This enforced silence has long since ceased to be uncomfortable for nuclear managers, who now clearly understand that their control will proceed more satisfactorily when it is invisible. Opponents, then, have undertaken the odd project of enforcing unspeakability, on the one hand, while also seeking to make nukes visible, thus making them controversial—a topic of conversation.27 Such strategies have a validity, as I will discuss in a later chapter, but it is not necessarily the validity the opponents promote. Just making the artifacts of nuclearism visible isn’t enough; they don’t speak for themselves. These artifacts—whether warheads or power plants—surely offer little help out of the paradox of unspeakability that both veils and unveils them, and all the while also seems to expect a solution. Finding nukes not only “speakable” but “fabulously textual,” nuclear criticism can respond to this odd political situation in part because many more strategic approaches become possible once we move the response to paradox out of an ‘‘unspeakable discourse’’ and into a textual or literary context.
Changing discourse doesn’t eliminate security dilemmas
Copeland, 00 (Dale, professor of government at University of Virginia, International Security 25:2, Fall 2000, ingenta)
Although the road ahead for Wendt’s neoconstructivism is still long, Social Theory of International Politics provides a solid constructivist vehicle for travel-ing it. The book allows scholars to differentiate clearly between truly material and ideational explanations, and between accounts that emphasize the role of states as actors and those that incorporate transnational forces and divisions within polities. It has reinforced the importance of diplomacy as a tool for re-ducing high levels of misunderstanding that can impede cooperation. Yet by bracketing off domestic processes, Wendt has overlooked the irony of constructivism: that the mutability of human ideational structures at the do-mestic level reinforces leaders’ great uncertainty about future intentions at the interstate level. The security dilemma, with all its implications, is real and per-vasive. It cannot be talked away through better discursive practices. It must be faced.
Arguing that representations determine reality destroys effective political action
Jarvis, 00 (Darryl, lecturer in IR at the University of Sydney, International relations and the challenge of postmodernism, 2000, p. 189-)
First, the project of subversive-deconstructive postmodernism can be seen as contrary to the discipline of International Relations as a social sci-ence designed not so much to generate knowledge as to disparage knowl-edge spawned through Enlightenment thinking and the precepts of rationality and science. At its most elemental, it is a project of disruption and an attack upon the "complacency" of knowledge generated in modernist quarters. Not that this is all bad. There is much good to come from a shakeup of the academy, from a reexamination of our ontological, episte-mological, and axiological foundations and from the types of practices that ensue from certain modes of conceptualization and analysis. Pointing out silences and omissions from the dominant discourse is always fruitful and necessary, but, arguably, also accomplished under theories and paradigms and from critical quarters that are not necessarily postrnodern and which do not seek to "undo" all knowledge simply on the basis of imperfection. Mod- ernist discourse is not unreflective, can make autonomous corrections, engage in revisionist history, identify injustices, crimes of exclusion, and extend representation to groups that were otherwise not previously repre-sented (think of liberalism or socialism for example!). This, after all, is why we understand modernity to be progressive and history a forward-moving narrative that is self-effusive. More importantly, given the self-defeating con-tradictions endemic to subversive-deconstructive postmodernism, especially its specious relativism, it requires no great mind to postulate that the use of modernist/rationalist/Enlightenment discourse will better make the case for a progressive politics of ever greater inclusion, representation, and jus-tice for all than will sloganistic calls for us to "think otherwise." The sim-ple and myopic assumption that social change can be engineered through linguistic policing of politically incorrect words, concepts and opinions, is surely one of the more politically lame (idealist) suggestions to come from armchair theorists in the last fifty years. By the same token, the suggestion that we engage in revisionism of the sort that would "undo" modernist knowledge so that we might start again free of silences, oppressions, and inequalities also smacks of an intelligentsia so idealist as to be unconnected to the world in which they live. The critical skills of subversive postmod-ernists, constrained perhaps by the success of the West, of Western capi-talism, if not liberal democracy, as the legitimate form of representation, and having tried unsuccessfully through revolution and political uprising to dethrone it previously, have turned to the citadel of our communal identities and attacked not parliaments, nor forms of social-political-economic organization, but language, communication, and the basis of Enlightenment knowledge that otherwise enables us to live, work, and communicate as social beings. Clever though this is, it is not in the end compatible with the project of theory knowledge and takes us further away from an understanding of our world. Its greatest contribution is to cele-brate the loss of certainty, where, argues John O'Neill, "men (sic) are no longer sure of their ruling knowledge and are unable to mobilize sufficient legitimation for the master-narratives of truth and justice." To suppose, however, that we should rejoice collectively at the prospects of a specious relativism and a multifarious perspectivism, and that absent any further constructive endeavor, the great questions and problems of our time will be answered or solved by this speaks of an intellectual poverty now famed perversely as the search for "thinking space."26
A focus on policy should precede discourse
Taft Kaufman 95
Jill Taft-Kaufman, Speech prof @ CMU, 1995, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, “Other Ways”, p pq
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.
AT: Defense Intellectuals = Exclusionary
Elitism is necessary and inevitable
Nyquist No Date
“Elitism Good and Bad”
Greg Nyquist is a freelance writer and independent scholar specializing in economics and philosophy. He has served as contributing editor to Dispatches and WorldNet magazines and is webmaster and assistant editor at
First, let us take a look at number one. Elitism is here defined as the practice of ruling by elites. On the surface, one could understand why people would consider this a bad thing. After all, democracy is the accepted form of political rule in this country, and anyone who believes that democracy does not represent, morally speaking, the highest form of government is, ipso facto, a bad person, end of argument. However, if by rule by elites we mean rule by the few, we must not be too hasty in condemning elitism on just these grounds, because in so doing we might not be merely condemning all oligarchic forms of government, but all forms of government whatsoever. Eighty years ago saw the publication of a modest book entitled, Dur Sozilogie des Parteiwesen in der modernen Demokratie, by the Robert Michels, a socialist who used his practical experience to write one of the most important books on politics of this century. Michels, in his book, asks the insidious little question, In what manner are democratic constitutions subject to tendencies inherent in social organization? After exhaustively examining the nature of organization and its relation to democracy, Michel concludes that leadership is indispensable to every organization including organized democratic government, because there must be a way of deciding questions which the group is not in a position, due to its ignorance, to decide. In any complex society, in any "extended order," as Hayek puts it, there must be a division of labor. If everyone had to do everything for themselves, civilization would be impossible. This is partly due to the fact that there are many indispensable spheres of economic and political action which require a great deal of time and effort (and sometimes even ability) to master. This is especially true of governing a nation. Even disregarding the problem of mere competence, it can be seen that the process of governing a country requires special learned skills. Legislation and implementation of law is an extremely complex process which the average person, occupied, as he is, with his own specialized occupation, simply does not have the time to master. And then there's the purely economic problem of having too many cooks in the kitchen: not everybody can play the role of the leader because very shortly the law of diminishing returns sets in until productivity reaches zero. Government, therefore, must be oligarchical, just as a ladies bridge club or basket-weaving union must also, to a certain extent, be oligarchal.
Michel's conclusions regarding the oligarchal nature of government-what he called "the iron law of oligarchy"-applies, of course (as hinted above), to all forms of organization, political or otherwise. This means that the first definition given to us by Webster's-namely, that elitism is the practice of rule by an elite-describes a fact. Now it would be entirely absurd for anyone to denounce a fact for being immoral. Only willed actions can be immoral; never facts. Consequently, if what is meant by the decriers and villifiers of elitism is the mere practice of rule by elites, then all we can say for such people is that they are beating their breasts to no purpose. To decry the practice of ruling by elites is as pointless and absurd as to decry the leopard for having spots. Both are facts over which human volition has no control. One might as well villify the earth for orbiting the sun than villify an organization for being ruled by an elite.
The act of identifying elitism implicates the accusers in the very crime which they condemn
Nyquist No Date
“Elitism Good and Bad”
Greg Nyquist is a freelance writer and independent scholar specializing in economics and philosophy. He has served as contributing editor to Dispatches and WorldNet magazines and is webmaster and assistant editor at
This much being understood we can finally put our finger on a definition of elitism which explains why so many people think it is a bad thing. The word elitism, as it is used in contemporary discourse, signifies any attempt to impose rules governing the selective process in certain areas of endeavor (e.g., culture, politics, etc.) which puts at a disadvantage some group (or groups) who would do better with a different set of rules.
A few things would be noticed about this definition from the start. First, many of those who use the word in its negative sense would claim that our definition does not come close to what they mean when they use it; and, as a sort of rebuttal, they might launch into a long spiel about Western Civilization and dead white males. My only reply to such protestations is that those people who are incapable of conceiving a particular case through an abstract category of denomination are congenitally incapable of understanding any abstract concept, let alone elitism, and would be much better off leaving intellectual subjects to those who can think.-Another aspect concerning this definition to note is that it makes of elitism an entirely relative category, free from any absolute moral significance. And in fact, the logic of our definition means that those who make the charge of elitism unwittingly implicate themselves in the very crime which they condemn, for to decry one set of rules implies allegiance to another. I realize that some will object, claiming that they are against all such rules. Unfortunately, such a viewpoint is entirely unfeasible. Elitism is a position that is forced on his whether we like it or not. It is imposed upon us by the very nature of the social interaction.
Refusal to accept elitism means it will inevitably rise up without human assistance
Nyquist No Date
“Elitism Good and Bad”
Greg Nyquist is a freelance writer and independent scholar specializing in economics and philosophy. He has served as contributing editor to Dispatches and WorldNet magazines and is webmaster and assistant editor at
What makes elitism unavoidable in society is the problem of limited access. Not everyone can be a professional artist, or a senator, or the best student in his class. Some selective process must be at work. The question is only: which one? If we stubbornly refuse to admit this fact, nevertheless, some selective process will rise up on its own without any human assistance whatsoever. Those who, then, claim to be for no rules in the selective process at all are merely the unwitting supporters of that selective process which would arise if none was imposed under the auspices of human wisdom or folly.
Since some selective process must be at work, the real issue involved is not elitism verses democracy or egalitarianism or anything of that nature, but merely one brand of elitism verses another. Now, since elitism is so inextricably a part of the human condition, the question naturally arises, What type of elitism should we attempt to foster? Elitism arises f from the fact that, in any complex society, a division of labor is necessitated by economic forces. This is true of any type of advanced economy, regardless of whether it has a capitalistic, interventionist, or socialistic structure. In concrete terms, this division of labor requires that each participant in the society chooses a particular type of labor. No one can be a doctor, janitor, editor, garbage collector, and engineer all at the same time, since many types of labor require the entire devotion of an individuals faculties. No man can become a competent doctor if he is moonlighting as a full-time janitor and furniture mover.
No Impact to “tech talk”
The everyday use of technocratic mantras have rendered them ineffective
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
Technocratic discourse uses mantric nostrums, ‘abstract notions that obscure real events’, and these are used over and over in public discourse [12, 64]. As they are used more and more, they tend to become meaningless. However, in technocratic discourse, such mantras play a vital role because, by infusing the condensed words or phrases throughout everyday language, the rationality of a particular type of political-economic system (in this instance, neo-classical economics and neoliberal politics) is naturalised by repetition. Technocratic mantras juxtapose and relate apparently interchangeable terms like enterprise, efficiency, globalisation, productivity, international competitiveness, trade liberalisation, the information economy, technology, and so on [5, chapt. 2]. For example, an embedded clause in Sentence 45 of the DFAT document says that trade liberalisation and an open economy contribute significantly to economic growth and job creation. Such juxtapositions allow technocratic authors ‘to tailor the apparent scientific “facts” to the needs of its policy arguments’ [15, 75]. As a result, they allow meaning to be abridged and stripped of its political and ideological connotations [16, 68]. Indeed, in today’s technocratic political environment, ‘language attached to power is designed to prevent communication’ [12, 57].
No large scale impacts to ‘tech talk’
Dr. Bernard and Graham ‘10
Dr. Bernard J. McKenna School of Communication Queensland University of Technology BA, PhD (The University of Queensland) BEd (Queensland University of Technology) MPhil (Griffith University) Philip Graham Department of Management University of Queensland.
“Technocratic discourse: A primer” 6/10/2010 Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 30, (3): 219-247.
We have argued, and demonstrated, that technocratic discourse is exclusionary and ‘monologic’ insofar as it is an “expert” language that operates within ‘sacrosanct, impenetrable boundaries [and thus]… retards and freezes thought’ [47, 133]. To date technocratic discourse has been a successful tool to “sell” neoclassical social policy, similar to a massive global advertising campaign. Its mantras now infuse “everyday” life as axioms for rationalising seemingly inevitable social and economic policy choices: it just “has to be that way”. As a ‘jargon of authenticity’, technocratic language has become ‘a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once’ [18, 5-6]. In other words, it successfully combines the democratic-familiar with the exclusionarytechnocratic through mass-mediated, repetitive normativity.
Perm Solves
Perm Solves – it’s necessary to master the language in order to attain public legitimacy to make real change
Carol Cohn ’87
Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory. (Summer, 1987), pp. 687-718. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Carol is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.
Most often, the act of learning technostrategic language is conceived of as an additive process: you add a new set of vocabulary words; you add the reflex ability to decode and use endless numbers of acronyms; you add some new information that the specialized language contains; you add the conceptual tools that will allow you to "think strategically." This additive view appears to be held by defense intellectuals themselves; as one said to me, -Much of the debate is in technical terms—learn it, and decide whether it's relevant later." This view also appears to be held by many who think of themselves as antinuclear, be they scholars and professionals attempting to change the field from within, or public interest lobbyists and educational organizations, or some feminist antimilitarists.' Some believe that our nuclear policies are so riddled with irrationality that there is a lot of room for well-reasoned, well-informed arguments to make a difference; others, even if they do not believe that the technical information is very important, see it as necessary to master the language simply because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. In either case, the idea is that you add the expert language and information and proceed from there.
Perm solves – it is essential to hold in sight both the complementary and contradictory aspects of these gender-laden perspectives on technology
Margaret Honey ’96
CCT REPORTS Issue No. 6 May 1996 “The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe”, Honey is Director of EDC's Center for Children and Technology. Katherine McMillan Culp is the Assistant Director for Research at EDC's Center for Chidlren and Technology, Fred Carrigg is the Executive Director of Academic Programs for the Union City New Jersey public schools and has worked in Union City for 27 years, MA]
As we have noted, however, the discursive reality that constitutes the technological universe leaves little room for the presence, let alone the realization, of the maternal voice. Indeed, many of the women we interviewed spoke about feeling marginalized and isolated within their professional communities. Our goal in carrying out this research was to identify the different pathways and different points of view that characterize women’s entry into and relationship with technological work, so that we might articulate a different framework for thinking about issues of gender and technology. What we have discovered is that it is essential to hold in sight both the complementary and contradictory aspects of these gender-laden perspectives on technology. It thus becomes possible to imagine the ways in which the maternal voice might serve to humble and humanize the grandiose (and frequently destructive) nature of technological discourse, and the ways in which this grandiosity might, in turn, be used to stretch the imaginative potential of the maternal voice.
1NC Jumbles Score
Performative strategies should usually include a score, which is a loose guide directing the activity during the speech in the same manner that the score of a symphony directs musicians to play.
Score for ‘Cut Up the 1AC’ – you and your partner take the text of the 1AC performance and divide it among each other. Begin the 1NC by both reading different sentences, fragments at random so that your voices overlap. Read both forwards and backwards. Read their headers and footers, mixed into the flow. Read some of it in funny accents and/or impressions of your opponents. Read for 1-3 minutes before moving on to next position.
CROSS – EX GUIDE:
Q: What was the first argument in the 1NC?
A: A cut-up.
Q: A what?
A: A cut-up. A spontaneous and unrehearsed juxtaposition of different parts of your 1AC performance against one another.
Q: OK. Why did you do that?
A: Why did you read your 1AC the way you read it? Cultural norms, grammars of speech, social conventions? We think our performance was superior to yours. It also does whatever it is that you claim to do, but better.
Q: Um... what does it mean?
A: That is not for us to decide. Meaning is always in the eye of the beholder, autocreated at the moment of apprehension. If we told you what it meant now we’d be interfering with the open-ness of the text to interpretation and play – we’d be preventing you from inventing your own meaning for it. There will always be many interpretations. Our performance was a tactical methodology – you defend yours, we’ll defend ours.
Q: What’s the net-benefit?
A: We can’t give away everything. The net-benefit was the performance.
2NC Cutting Up the 1AC
Our methodology is a necessary challenge to the spider-webs of re-capture by systems of capital, language and subjectivity which will inevitably re-integrate the affirmative’s approach into a new war machine of technical debate conformity. The cut-up approach, taken by William S. Burroughs in his novels which dissect the very loss of valuation that late capitalism collapses into, the machine that meaninglessly consumes and produces, and is finally interrupted by the author himself. Burroughs dis-aggregates the narrative form through cutting up, we are a dis-aggregation of the technical machine of debate, which takes in spoken words, evidence, training, money, laptops and produces ballots filled out with wins and losses and subjects ready for obedience. Cutting up is our intervention into the 1AC -- to literalize the calls for pluralism and difference not in the structure but in the presentation of the 1AC by reformulating juxtapositions and creating an escape route for life that opens up space for social change
Murphy 97 (Timothy S., U of CA, “Wising Up The Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs” p. 4-7)
Burroughs's literary career is defined by the central challenge he sets himself: to find an escape route from the linked control systems of capital, subjectivity, and language. His early novels, from Junky (J, 1953) to Naked Lunch (NL, 1959), address the accelerating dialectic of capitalist control of American society, a form of control that functions by transforming the individual into the "addict agent" who is the mirror image of the controller. These novels also articulate a critique of the "administered life" that parallels Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. He examines the reversibility of hostile social relations and the symmetry of opposed political factions, and he articulates his theory that language, which is a virus that uses the human body as a host, constitutes the most powerful form of control. In these works Burroughs, like Horkheimer and Adorno, cannot yet imagine a form of revolutionary practice to counter these forms of control; society appears trapped between the horns of capitalism's constitutive dialectic, which liquidates the singularity of the individual as well as the connections of community in order to produce the false universality of profit. As Burroughs writes later, money "eats quality and shits out quantity" (Burroughs and Odier 74), a situation that the writer cannot change but can only reveal. These works constitute what we might call the modernist subset of his writing. In the aleatory Nova trilogy (196167), however, Burroughs recognizes the sterile form of the dialectic itself as his primary enemy and attempts to escape it by destroying the linguistic control system of syntax and by simultaneously abolishing the dialectical form of the Law. All of his subsequent texts can be understood as increasingly systematic and sophisticated attempts to evade the dialectic, which continually returns in unexpected forms to reinscribe Burroughs's revolutionary enterprise within despotic capital and language; in this, Burroughs's development quite strongly resembles that of Deleuze. 6 In their formal and thematic focus on language, however, the novels of the trilogy abet the postmodern turn away from historical potential and toward structural foreclosure. The "cut-up" experiments eventually lead him out of the cynicism of the Nova trilogy's reflexive postmodernism, however, and toward a renewed commitment to social change; in The Wild Boys and his recent works, Burroughs seeks ways to organize resistance to the new forms of control in the construction of revolutionary fantasies that can produce new social groups. In The Wild Boys (WB, 1971), these countercultural fantasies are still conceived as dialectically destructive forces that negate the given social order but refuse to offer new forms of social organization; thus their failure, like the failure of the radical student movements that inspired them, follows from the persistence of the dialectic. The trilogy Cities of the Red Night (C), The Place of Dead Roads (P), and The Western Lands (WL; 198187) continues this destructive task, but it also offers affirmative ways to reorganize society in order to avoid the powerful dialectics of social and linguistic control. Such reorganization, finally, necessitates a change of terrain for Burroughs's work. He concludes The Western Lands with the admission that "he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then?" (WL 258) The open question suggests that something more is still to be done once language is abandoned. Deleuze uses very similar terms to describe what he sees as the task of revolutionary literature: "This modern literature uncovers a 'strange language within language' and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as Mallarmé's book, . . . Artaud's breaths, the agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as well as [Raymond] Roussel's proliferations . . . and so on)."7 The labor of eliminating the dialectic, and with the dialectic its handmaidens language, capital, and the human subject must take us into different realms; accordingly, this study will conclude by tracing the extension of Burroughs's literary project into film and recording to suggest what can happen after "the end of words." This entire project is contained, potentially, in Burroughs's proclamation that "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted." This phrase is his famous battle-cry against social and personal control, a slogan explicitly cribbed from the legendary Ismâ'îlî holy man-cum-terrorist Hassan i Sabbah. The phrase is quoted in most of Burroughs's books from the Nova trilogy onward, and it serves to conclude the "Invocation" that opens his most recent trilogy (C xviii). In the 1989 text "Apocalypse" (written as the introduction to a Keith Haring exhibition catalog and read by Burroughs on his first compact disc, Dead City Radio), Burroughs offers his own gloss on the phrase: Consider an apocalyptic statement: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted"Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behavior; that would be a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe, illusion, dream, art. When art leaves the frame, and the written word leaves the page, not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages of assigned categories, a basic disruption of reality occurs. The literal realization of art. Success will write "apocalypse" across the sky. It is a question of causality and condition: if something is true, then something else must be maligned and prohibited by the Law as false, but if nothing is true - which is to say if there is no such thing as essential truth - then there can be no prohibition, no Law, and everything is permitted. And it is permitted precisely in the form of creative art, whose only condition and referent is itself. The "basic disruption of reality" which Burroughs demands is neither the modern disruption of traditional structures of value, nor the postmodern disruption of modernist mythologizing; rather, it is the "literal realization of art," a realization which simultaneously requires the destruction of art as a separate category, as a mirror to nature and life. "[A]rt leaves the frame, and the written word leaves the page" in order to change material reality, not by asserting some essential truth that they alone could preserve against the ideological falsity of reality, but by multiplying and disseminating the creative power of the false, the untrue, the forgery. Art is falsehood or lie because it does not find its proof outside itself, through a process of truthful representation, but within itself, as Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde argued. In much the same spirit, Deleuze specifies that the apocalyptic project of art is "not simply to eliminate fiction but to free it from the model of truth which penetrates it, and on the contrary to rediscover the pure and simple story-telling function [fonction de fabulation] which is opposed to this model. What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers, it is the story-telling of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend or a monster" (Deleuze, Cinema-2150). Such a memory or monster acts as a catalyst that precipitates a fused, revolutionary force out of the atomized subjects of oppression. This powerful story-telling or fabulatory function is the goal to which Burroughs in his novels and Deleuze in his philosophy spire.
2NC Cutting Up the 1AC
The 1AC is reactively nihilistic in its critique of debate. Rather than treating the language of the 1AC as meaningful, we expose its arbitrariness through cutting it up which creates an alternative form of organization that cannot be simply captured within the matrix of another conventional narrative ‘attack on policy debate’
Sanchez ‘6 Kevin, Hard Knocks, cross- post “linkages between burroughs and d&g: positivity, rhizomatics, BwO, and anti-fascism... September 26
from Retaking the Universe, an essay entitled 'Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory' by Allen Hibbard (Director of Graduate Studies at Tennessee State University), pages 18-9 : "It is perhaps Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who provide the most fitting theoretical tools for elucidating Burrough's life and work. Timothy S. Murphy, in his study Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, examines the connections between Burroughs and Deleuze and Guattari. Murphy identifies a strain of literature, subsequent to modernism, which at once liberates itself from the totalizing claims of modernism and resists the groundlessness of so much of podermodernism. As he puts it, '[t]he amodernist alternative to (post)modernism, briefly, shares the modernist and postmodernist suspicion of representational art and politics, but rejects both the constitutive asymmetries of modernist myth-mongering and the postmodern abandonment of critique in the face of the procession of simulacra' (1997:29). Burrough's amodernism - like Ralph Ellison's in Invisible Man - carves out a space/place in which constructive, positive resistance is possible. Rather than simply launching attacks on the existing structures, it allows alternative forms of organization based on libertarian principles to emerge. The analytical tools and vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, Murphy suggests, like Burrough's literary project, provide routes toward new ways of thinking. In A Thousand Plateaus, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari (who, they note at the outset, are fused and transformed through their collaboration) distinguish between what they call 'rhizomatic' and 'root' thinking. The image of root thinking is the tree; thought moves and multiplies along the lines of a strict binary logic. The image of rhizomatic thinking is the bulb or tuber; the rhizome follows principles of 'connection and heterogeneity', 'multiplicity' and 'asignifying rupture' (1980:7-9). The very nature of a book, Deleuze and Guattari submit, has traditionally been bound by root thinking. A Thousand Plateaus is conceived and composed rhizomatically. That is, theoretically, the book does not depend upon linear reading. The reader can dip in and out of the book, constructing his or her own logic, skipping around, moving backwards and forwards, setting the book aside to read another book by another author, coming back, jumping in at another point, depending upon the reader's own will or whim. Burrough's own books certainly have this rhizomatic quality. They are arranged rather plotted. They do not operate according to the logic of conventional narratives (though, as many critics have noted, the later works have more of a narrative thread). There is always an element of spontaneity and surprise, with radical shifts from one point to another, from one character to another, without warning, thus challenging the notion of one singular 'logic'. What we have, then, is simply juxtaposition: one element placed beside another, if not randomly, at least not wholly and inviolably dependent on that which came before: thus the potential for radical change. Certainly, Burroughs's thinking is rhizomatic, as it celebrates hetereogenity and intentionally creates points of rupture, ways of breaking loose from old, calcified patterns. Not surprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari were drawn to Burroughs's work. Indeed, Robin Lydenberg has even suggested that Burroughs influenced the composition of A Thousand Plateaus. They recognized Burroughs's cut-up method as a way of 'making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow', and challenging singular, unitary, wholly linear notions of knowledge, though they wonder whether an implied 'supplementary dimension' might point toward a unity that 'continues its spiritual labor' (1980:6). And, in Naked Lunch, they found a superb example of their notion of the Body without Organs (BwO), which they define in Anti-Oedipus as 'the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable', the 'imageless, organless body' that can resist being integrated into the established machines producing desires and products, ready-made for consumption (1972:8). [1] As an example of the 'drugged body' (one of the forms of a body inclined to BwO, along with the hypochondriac body, the paranoid body, the schizo body and the masochist body), they cite this passage from Naked Lunch: 'The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place' (NL 119; cited by Deleuze and Guattari 1980:150).
2NC Cutting Up the 1AC
Cutting up the 1AC creates an explosion of the formulation of politics that defies linear narratives, presenting the affirmative’s political act in an impossibly unpredictable formulation that resists capture and re-crystallized within the boundaries of thought itself, as the affirmative simply becomes re-domesticated within the confines of deliberative or Socratic discourse, simply another seminar in the school building, our cut-up provokes questioning of the abstract machines that have colonized their debate thinking caps with their side-ways roots and built their rhizomatic meanings out of cogency and deliberation. The 1AC builds a prison out of coherence and ties themselves to the ballot to drown in the solipsism of enjoying the sound of their own voices. Thus, the cut-up destabilizes the fundamental relationship between the meaning that ______ presents at the beginning of the round to the question of the ballot
Lydenberg ’87 (Robin, Associate Prof of English at Boston College, “Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction.” p. 52-53)
The reversibility and flexibility of the cut-up text suggests the possibility of a flight, of continual evolution and change. Instead of condensed liquefaction into a single image, Burroughs creates in his experimental writing- particularly in the cut-up narratives- a random and infinite variety of implosions and explosions, the pulsing rhythm of life itself. Medical experiements in Naked Lunch amuse themselves by arresting or cutting off the life cycle of “tension discharge rest” at the moment of extreme tension: “what would be result of administering curare plus iron lung during acute mania? Possibly the subject, unable to discharge his tensions in motor activity, would succumb on the spot like a jungle rat. Interesting cause of death, what?” (NL 131). The cut-up texts offer[s] an antidote to this terminal paralylsis in metonymic condensations that always lead to explosion, dissemination, expansion. The cycle is always recharged: “You in the Word and the Word in You is a word-lock […] the word-lock that is You, Stop, Change. Start again. Lighten your own life sentence” (TM 61). On a most concrete and obvious level, Burroughs’ own texts resist finality by being constantly reissued in different versions, fragments large and small surfacing in new works and new contexts. The original publication dates of three cut-up novels- The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964)- suggest a sequence in which the critic might discover some coherent progression or development. Burroughs’ habit of substantially revising manuscripts for each new edition, however, makes any rigid adherence to such a linear model rather awkward. Thus, in addition tot eh common base of fictional material which feeds all the cut-up novels and thus blurs their boundaries, each individual text is subject to the indeterminancy of continual revision. Beyond his challenge to the limitations of conventional linear narrative, Burroughs also attacks the equally restrictive linearity of literary history. A bibliography of Burroughs’ work reads rather like Borges’ catalogue of the writings of the apocryphal Pierre Menard, whose technique of “deliberate anocronism” turns history inside out. The trilogy of cut-up novels has been described by Philippe Mikriammos as a false trilogy, a single book completed in three versions, under three different angles (William Burroughs 77). As we shall see in examining th three novels, the prose itself reflects this resistance to closure. Burroughs’ style tends to “anamorphosis,” “It rubs itself out and rewrites itself” (Lemaire 23). The Method: Vigilance and the Risks of Chance. Released from the burden of subjectivity, of authorship and ownership, the cut-up text opens up possibilities for what Burroughs calls “space/time travel.” Such futuristic journeys call for detachment, for scientific rigor and control. While Burroughs had already brought literature and science together in Naked Lunch, in the cut-up narratives he makes this connection even more explicit. He insists, for example, that his cut-up techniques are not arguments or “positions” but scientific experiments. The practical work of the writer is a continuous experiment; daily life is transcribed by Burroughs into scrapbook mosaics of word and image, into notebooks and diaries where clippings and photographs are accumulated and coordinated with a variety of texts.
2NC Cutting Up the 1AC
The affirmative’s focus on dialogue is simply an attempt to replicate the liberalist deliberative debate that characterizes an ideal discursive face which has already been written as white, affluent and male by socializations of privilege. In attempting to “be real” they ignorantly situate us in a reality of the debate space which is always mediated by technique and expectation of form – a space which is always already colonized by simulacra. While the affirmative team attempts to break with the structure altogether, they reveal this strategy in a sort of performativity which is still qritiq for its own sake, debate for the sake of debate. Only the elocution of the 1AC which, through juxtaposing already-heard concepts forces the question of new meaning from old material allows us to use the standard format of debate effectively against itself
Sanchez ‘7 Kevin, Hard Knocks, cross- post “you're already using reflexive fiat” March 20
think i should better explain the relevance of the three foucault quotations in the preceeding post and better demonstrate how the history of literature in the western world parellels the history of evidence in american policy debate:
foucault describes literature as shedding its representative anchor ("for now we no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial word upon which the infinite movement of discourse was founded and by which it was limited") in the same way debate is losing its formalist bearing, that is, the a priori certainty of its foundation, the hallowed conventions of its framers. he writes that representation dissolves language's inscription to/in the fabric of the world -- aren't we close here to deleuze's critique of representational thinking that turns real problems into 'mere phantoms' (post #126)? or gordon mitchell's critique of 'the sterile laboratory'-model of debate that distances participants from the raw reality of current events? ...to quote the above shell: "the sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or misfortune."
{in baudrillard's (may he rest in peace) terminology, this is how we get from representation to simulation - the image first reflects reality, then masks and denatures it, and ultimately cuts all ties to ('real') reality, becoming at last its own pure simulacrum that's more than real (or 'hyperreal').}
if the art of classical literature was 'making a sign', the art of traditional debate was 'cutting a card', and foucault implicates the process of turning empirical data into signifying chains by way of arrangement, reduplication, capture, and designation, as reality is endlessly deferred, taken from a secondary source three degrees removed (in a word, hearsay). yet (as baudrillard reminds us) there's no hope of a simple return to presence. foucault suggests we use this split between 'the real world' and the represented world in order to give language an autonomy all its own, that is, in order to advance a 'counter-discourse'. like literature throughout the 19th century, this kritik can use the standard format of debate against itself. and like writers/readers of modern literature, debaters need to learn that 'what does X mean?' is too narrow-minded a question for an open(ing) forum. it remains ensnared in signification. it reeks of a binary logic (as in 'does this card flow affirmative or negative?'). this sets before us the essentially literary task of debate as key to the activity's continued growth and enlightenment, and thereby necessitates the problematization of the current unquestioned practices which confine debate's creative potential. how does one concretely go about creating a counter-discourse? perhaps one should read the second quotation (page 299 of the order of things) alongside an interview with foucault on 'the functions of literature' (chapter 18 of politics, philosophy, culture). we're presented everyday with a culture (both in and out of debate) that's buried itself under an avalanche of knowledge. all this informational overkill produces works (books, kritiks) that're intentionally 'difficult to access' yet increasingly 'self-referential'. the self-enclosed nature of literature (or policy debate) shelters itself within what foucault calls 'a radical intrasitivity'. in the interview, foucault says there's an implicit agreement between so-called avant-garde groups and university teachers that's led to a 'very heavy political blockage' -- likewise with kritik debaters/coaches and some of their deceptive, inaccessible arguments: the question is, how to use this intrasitivty in an empowering way?
so this defines again the task of kritikal debate as not accepting kritik for its own sake, but actively resucitating 'the naked power of speech'. i've referred to this as moving from performativity to illocutionarity. fundamental to this move is the concept that thinking (and thereby speaking) is an act. pure inaction is no longer a possible option.
A2: Permutations
They should have to defend a methodological approach to debate since they have literally no other advocacy—that includes the presentation of their 1AC as a linear and cohesive narrative that was both intelligible and legible, and which challenged the norms of debate. If they do not do this then they have not affirmed anything, vote negative on presumption, or use the ballot as a rhizomatic counterplan to justify the affirmative speech act. Without that structural critique of debate the affirmative is meaningless or at least boring, which are both reasons to vote negative. The permutation doesn’t “solve” anything, and there’s always a risk that their structural challenge to debate re-entrenches the sort of argumentative violence that they criticize. Permutation also only make sense in the context of an advocacy statement, which if they don’t have, you simply should dismiss the permutation as illogical, or as a form of resentment against the rhizome which is a reason why they don’t solve any of their method arguments if they are so willing to abandon them in order to get the ballot, which fundamentally proves that they are locked within the same win/loss continuum that chains their liberatory project to systems of entrenched privilege
If they were serious about their pedagogy then they would take the radical act of eliminating the competition through the self-effacing act of offering us the ballot and then engaging us in Socratic dialogue- the fact that they would abandon their method arguments proves that they are either disingenuous or that their project can easily be coopted by the debate system’s promise of competitive success, or that their method will create new forms of oppressive debate training which re-justifiy the hierarchies of knowledge that they criticizes
Permutations are mathematically impossible in the instance where selection of a resulting equation is variable as in a debate round—searching for a permutation only causes frustration that results in classroom violence
Cook ‘9 John, math teacher “Classroom violence, combinations, and permutations” September 2
A woman nearly became violent in a math class I taught several years ago. I was going over homework problems and she wanted to know whether a certain problem was a “permutation” or a “combination.” She knew how to solve two kinds of problems and was irritated when I told her that her homework problem didn’t fall into either of her two categories. She insisted that I tell her which of the two techniques would solve the problem and nearly lost control when I repeated that neither would work. The rest of the students and I were shocked. A little nervous laughter broke the tension and we resumed going over the homework. The angry student had implicitly come to believe that if a counting problem contains two numbers, n and k, there are only two possible answers: P(n, k) and C(n, k). Here P(n, k) = n!/(n-k)! and C(n, k) = P(n, k)/k!. She was not alone. Students commonly believe this, and for good reason: most homework problems can be solved this way. For example, a club with 12 members can elect five distinct officers in P(12, 5) ways and they can select a committee of five members in C(12, 5) ways. It’s easy for an instructor or textbook author to think of dozens of homework problems in these patterns and unintentionally imply that these are these are the only possibilities. However, the following problem contains the numbers 12 and 5 but the solution is neither P(12, 5) nor C(12, 5). Suppose you have a class of 12 students. Each student will receive one of five letter grades: A, B, C, D, or F. At the end of the course, you tally up how many students received each grade. How many different ways could the tally turn out? For example, one possibility would be all A’s. Another would be three A’s, four B’s, four C’s, no D’s, and one F. The grade tally problem is representative of a class of problems that come up fairly often in application but that lie just outside what students typically learn. The general solution is written up in these notes on counting selections with replacement. The notes include the famous “stars and bars” explanation by William Feller. By the way, there are 1,820 possible grade tallies for 12 students and five grades.
A2: Permutations
The permutation’s strategic value within the debate round means that it doesn’t re-capitulate the spontaneous juxtaposition of meaning that makes the cut-up “literalization of art” that resists against the banality of debate dominations
Century [no date] Dan “William S. Burroughs and Cut-up”
For the uninitiated, the Cut-up technique was inspired by the collage technique used by artists and photographers. Often the greatest photographs and artwork happen by accident. An unexpected pedestrian walks into your shot, or an odd glob of paint scars your painting, and rather than tragedy you have something unexpected and spontaneous. Take this concept one step further and the artist can juxtapose various visual fragments with great and unexpected results. Gysin and Burroughs wanted to introduce the spontaneity and chance of the collage to the written word, and so they developed and utilized the Cut-up technique.
Spontaneity is a form of lived dreaming that itself resists control and is by far is the greatest value in the debate
William S. Burroughs 1959, drug addict, time-traveler, author, Letters of William S. Burroughs ed. Oliver Harris pg.268-269
"The novel is taking shape. Something even more evil than atomic destruction is the theme--namely an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man,
so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted by scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences. In short this drug eliminates the disturbing factor of spontaneous, unpredictable life from the human equation. I have spoken of the increased sensitivity to dream-like, nostalgic impressions that is conveyed by light junk-sickness. This is point of departure for creation of anti-dream drug. Novel treats of vast Kafkian conspiracies, malevolent telepathic broadcast stations, the basic conflict between the East--representing spontaneous, emergent life, and the West--representing control from without, character armor, death...”
A2: Enwonderment
We should investigate the beauty of language by removing its sense. Only by removing the connotations of civilization and knowledge from language can we enter into the rabbit hole- we must experience the unheimlich of words without the illusion of meaning before we can experience wonder. Cellar door becomes Celadore and thus beautiful.
Nunberg 10. (Geoffrey, adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Linguistics researcher, professor of History of Information and Concepts of Information. I do a feature on language on the NPR show "Fresh Air" and author of commentaries on language for the NYT Week in Review, as well as for other periodicals, contributor to the BBC4 series "State of the Union,” emeritus chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. “The Romantic Side of Familiar Words.” February 26, 2010. ps)
I'm still noodling over Grant Barrett's "On Language" column in the New York Times the week before last, which tracked the recurring claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in English. It was a model of dogged word-sleuthing, which took us from George Jean Nathan to Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer and Donnie Darko (winnowed down, Grant said on the ADS list, from more than 80 citations for the story he collected). But the very breadth of the material raised questions that couldn't be addressed in that forum. What accounts for the enduring appeal of this claim in English linguistic folklore? And more specifically: is there a reason why everybody settles on cellar door in particular? I think there is, ultimately. Are you sitting comfortably?
At a first pass, claiming that cellar door is the most beautiful expression of English permits you to make a show of your aesthetic refinement. When you ask most people the question, after all, they’ll give you the names of the objects of sentimental attachment (mother, home), of worthy ideals (liberty, peace), or of conventionally “poetic” subjects (dawn, swan). Now these are genuinely aesthetic claims — “liberty is so dear to me that I thrill at very the sound of its name.” But for just that reason, it’s hard not to hear a certain self-congratulation in those choices, which is what wags are sending up when they answer the question with pointed philistinism: the most beautiful words in the language, various people have said, are really "check enclosed" or "it's benign," or simpl[e]y — F. Scott Fitzgerald's response until he thought better of it — "money."
For the aesthete, by contrast, the question is an occasion to display a capacity to discern beauty in the names of prosaic things. It’s a classic ploy of conoisseurship, from the early collectors of Warhol and Oldenburg back to the seventeenth-century collectors who professed to prefer the bamboccianti paintings of Roman street life to works with historical or allegorical themes.
That's obviously part of the story, and it explains why the tellers of these stories sometimes make reference to experts who have validated the judgment as a scientific finding rather than a subjective judgment — the “famous linguist” who’s credited with the claim in Donnie Darko or the “committee of Language Hump-type professors,” that Norman Mailer ascribed it to in Why Are We in Vietnam? – on the popular assumption (you'll hear no contradiction from me) that we linguists have ways of finding these things out. Or the perception is credited to a foreigner who’s ignorant of the meaning of the term, which proves that the the beauty of cellar door rests on universal phonaesthetic principles.
But if that were all there is to it, there would be nothing to recommend cellar door over other expressions drawn from everyday life. Why didn't the popular fancy seize on cistern, for example (said to be Truman Capote's nomination)? Or Ring Lardner's gangrene, scam, and mange, which drive home the aesthetic autonomy hypothesis even more dramatically? For that matter, why not rag mop (or alternatively ragg mopp), the discovery of whose phonaesthetic charms exerted a profound influence on the genesis of rock n' roll, not to mention educational television?
There's a clue to the answer in Grant’s observation that “Sometimes, the loveliness of cellar door is thought to be more evident when the phrase is given a different spelling." He goes on to cite a remark of C. S. Lewis: “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing cellar door as Selladore, one produces an enchanting proper name.” (Lewis's non-rhotic version of the phrase, of course, would have worked a lot better as the name of an fantasy kingdom than the version of someone from Wisconsin.) Tolkien made the same point when he said that the beauty of the phrase emerged most clearly when it was “dissociated from its sense (and its spelling).” To perceive the beauty of cellar door, that is, we have to transcend not just its semantics but its orthography, to recover the pre-alphabetic innocence that comes when we let "the years of reading fall away," in Auden's phrase, to attune ourselves with sonorities that are hidden from the ear behind the overlay of writing.
But what happens when we strip cellar door down to its pristine phonetic bones, it turns out, is that it at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkein turned into a staple of fantasy fiction. (I think of the English teacher's line in Alan Bennett's The History Boys: "What I didn't want was to turn out boys who would talk in their middle age of a deep love of language and their love of words. 'Words,' said in that reverential way that is somehow… Welsh.") It's significant that the foreigner to whom the recognition of the beauty of cellar door is often credited in these stories is usually an Italian or "a Spanish lady," or occasionally a Japanese friend — but never a Fleming or a Czech.
These are the languages of the impulsive, passionate peoples of the South or the edenic past –- and also, by the by, the "feminine" languages, in more than just the prosodic sense of the term. The gendered English perception of phonaesthetic beauty hasn't changed a lot since Swift's "Proposal for Correcting, Amending, and Ascertaining the English Tongue" (1712):
More than once, where some of both Sexes were in Company, I have persuaded two or three of each, to take a Pen, and write down a number of Letters joyned together, just as it came into their Heads, and upon reading this Gibberish we have found that which the Men had writ, by the frequent encountering of rough Consonants, to sound like High Dutch; and the other by the Women, like Italian, abounding in Vowels and Liquids… I cannot help thinking, that since they have been left out of all Meetings…, our Conversation hath very much degenerated.
The fact is, then, that a large proportion of these "most beautiful English words" that aesthetes like to cite owe their claim to beauty entirely on a fancied resemblance to the words of other languages, rather than any inherent "English" phonaesthetic virtues. To show how great a role meaning plays in these judgments, Max Beerbohm once wrote "If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes." And Beerbohm could have added that a change in the connotations of a word is sufficient to alter the perception of its beauty. Shortly after Grant's piece appeared, Larry Horn wrote to the ADS list to ask whether cellophane was regarded as equally lovely. Larry was being arch, I assume, but in fact when it was first developed, cellophane was a glamorous product — recall the lines from Cole Porter's "You're the Top": "You're the National Gallery, You're Garbo's salary, You're cellophane." And indeed, in 1940, Stephen Fenichell reports in Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century, "cellophane crowned its ethereal dominance of the depression decade by placing close to the top in a nationwide poll designed to determine 'the most beautiful words in the English language.' Cellophane placed third — beaten by 'mother' and 'memory.'" True or not, there was a time when the story was plausible. But cellophane had a big phonetic head start over bakelite, and it's significant that Beerbohm chose to make his point using gondola and scrofula, rather than skiff and scurvy, whose phonetic shapes would have disqualified them from even entering the pageant.
Actually, none of this shows that the fact that meaning and orthography play a role in our ordinary phonaesthetic judgments makes them erroneous. I love the verb brood ("And no more turn aside and brood/Upon love's bitter mystery"), and that judgment isn't undermined in the slightest by my indifference to the form when it's used as a noun or the preterite of brew. The real self-deception here is in the aesthetes' conviction that their judgments are based in pure sonority rather than kitschy ethnolinguistic stereotypes.
And in fact the specific meaning of cellar door isn't quite as irrelevant as people imagine. The undeniable charm of the story — the source of the delight and enchantment that C. S. Lewis reported when he saw cellar door rendered as Selladore -- lies the sudden falling away of the repressions imposed by orthography (which is to say, civilization) to reveal what Dickens called "the romantic side of familiar things." It's the benign cousin of the disquietude we may feel when familiar things are suddenly charged with strange and troubling feelings, which Freud analyzed in his essay on the Unheimlich or uncanny. As Freud observed, heimlich can mean either “homey, familiar,” or “"concealed, withheld, kept from sight." He goes on: “‘Unheimlich’ is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of’ heimlich’, and not of the second. …” But he notes that the second meaning is always present as well: “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” Something is unheimlich, he says, because it “fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression."
The unheimlich object, that is, is a kind of portal to the romance and passion that lie just beneath the surface of the everyday. In the world of fantasy, that role is suggested literally in the form of a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, a brick wall at platform 9¾. Cellar door is the same kind of thing, the expression people keep falling on to illustrate how civilization and literacy put the primitive sensory experience of language at a remove from conscious experience – "under a spell, so the wrong ones can't find it" — until it's suddenly thrown open. It would be hard make that point using rag mop.
Aff Conditionality 1NC
A. Negation Theory- in order to negate the affirmative we require a stable locus of offense which informs the judge’s political approach to the 1AC versus the 1NC substantive strategy
B. Judge the 1AC As A Rhetorical Artifact- The affirmative should not be allowed to make permutations if they do not have a firmly established advocacy and they should be bound to defend their 1AC as a rhetorical artifact. Failure to do this proves that they wouldn’t be debatable even if we had prepared a specific strategy and demonstrates a separate moving target abuse claim, which is a voting issue for fairness, also proves that you can justify the 1AC speech act with a negative ballot since they not only do they not defend THE resolution, but they do not meet the minimal burden of defending A resolution, which means that their arguments don’t rise to the level of meaning they should win the debate round
*** NEG MISC!
Public Engagement DA
Bureaucratic language reduces citizens’ ability to affect the government- it creates a hierarchy of language that prevents citizen engagement
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Bureaucratese distances the listener from the speaker and vice versa. Communication often takes place in third person. Such discourse is thus sterile and uniform, reducing the humane element of communication as well as the substance and context of the exchange. Bureaucratese permits the organizational rules to do the communicating in place of the individual. This leaves the speaker as almost an accidental, nonessential part of the message. In normal communication, what is said is not separated from who say sit and meaning is contextual, with context defined by the shared experiences of both speaker and listener (Searle, 1989). However, bureaucratese imposes a false order on communication. The bureaucrat's reference point is not the people served or even the context or environment in which communication occurs. The public must become a bureaucratic insider to understand what is being communicated. In plain English the messenger shapes the message. In bureaucratese, the speaker is assumed to be detached from the message and from the act of communication. The degree of flexibility and reciprocity in the message is reduced. Thus, the message communicated becomes an institutional one. This institutional language of bureaucracy is often one-dimensional and, as such, citizens dealing with government must adjust to what is said to them (Hummel, 1994; Killingsworth, 1984). In other words, bureaucratese talks at you, not with you. This one-way form of communication does not permit feedback and allows administrators to interpret meaning in several different ways. Thus, bureaucratese forces an institutionalized, administrative language on the public, superseding the actual organizational environment and context of the communication.
Language is key- it frames public perception of issues
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Numerous problems are associated with the misuse of language in government. They include the distortion of meaning and reality, the effect of distancing one from a sense of personal responsibility for their actions ,and deception, whereby language is used to misinform or manipulate. Moreover, many public management problems and the general lack of trust in government may be rooted in the language of bureaucracy. Language, after al, is the means by which public officials articulate the practices of government. Language also shapes our thoughts and frames the nature of public issues. Five problems, in particular, are identified.
Analysis and public debate over the aff are the only effective starting point for their policies- any other foundation causes other states to weaponize.
Weiner 5. (Tim, reporter for the New York Times. “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs.” May 18, 2005. ps)
While the Missile Defense Agency struggles with new technology for a space-based laser, the Air Force already has a potential weapon in space.
In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.
Another Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
A third program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world. A fourth seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast," in the words of an Air Force plan.
Captain Hardesty, in the new issue of the Naval War College Review, calls for "a thorough military analysis" of these plans, followed by "a larger public debate."
"To proceed with space-based weapons on any other foundation would be the height of folly," he concludes, warning that other nations not necessarily allies would follow America's lead into space.
Link - Euphemisms
Euphemisms serve to distort harsh realties, making acts of evil sound somehow legitimate and desensitizing us
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Euphemisms are words or phrases that serve to soften or distort harsh realities. When used in place of an unpleasant incident or fact, euphemisms serve to mislead or deceive. They downplay the actual meaning or intent of the phenomenon. For example, when 'arbitrary deprivation of life' is used by the military in place of 'kiling' , It minimizes the harshness and the effect of the act. Euphemisms could also confuse the listener or make the act sound as if it is legitimate and acceptable. This can be seen in the military's terminology of
'incontinent ordinance' or 'collateral casualties' in place of the reality of unintentional deaths.
Link- Jargon
Jargon lends false authority to the speaker and confuses those who don’t understand it
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Jargon is a specialized language. Normally, members of a profesion, select group, or organization use it. While jargon might be necessary for technical communication among professionals or might be widely understood within an organization, jargon can be utterly unknown to those outside the group. Jargon gives a false sense of authority to the speaker. An example comes from the language used in government security where 'to run the traps' means to conduct a security clearance, which is also known as a 'screning' , a 'check' , or 'clearing' someone. Jargon can also include technical, scientific, or even culturaly-specific terms. Often, such jargon may have emerged only recently, within the vocabulary of a limited part of society, or might have been borrowed from pop culture or new state-of-the-art technologies. The problem is that, without a shared history of the word by the producers and consumers of this technical-speak, meaning is lost, especially for those unfamiliar with the technology or science. Examples include words like 'interface' ,'synergy' ,'network' ,'download' , and 'proactive' .Within the jargon of bureaucratese one also finds excessive use of 'isms', 'izes', 'ations', and 'ages' added unnecessarily to words. These additions only add confusion or improperly alter the original meaning of the word. For instance, stopping work becomes a 'work stoppage'. Speaking or saying something becomes a 'verbalization' and bureaucratic improvements 'optimize' resources.
Link- Acronyms
Technical Acronyms place government out of the reach of the people and confuse the public
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Relatedly, the excessive use of gerunds often accompanies jargon. A gerund is a word that has the characteristics of both noun and verb. It is found when one uses a verb or the verbal form of a word as a noun by ending it in 'ing'. In bureaucratese for example, are port becomes a 'finding'. Other problems include cliches and acronyms, which appear with regularity in bureaucratese. An acronym is a word formed from the first leters of words that describe something. Arguably, this is one of the most widely abused features of bureaucratese. To the general public, the language of IGR, OSHA, ADA, GAO, and ZBB sounds like alphabet soup. The bureaucracy, perhaps more than any other institution, ought to be open and accessible to the entire citizenry. When government uses jargon that is unfamiliar to the general public, public services are placed out of reach of the people.
Link- Redundancies
Redundancies overwhelm the public and lend false credibility to those saying them
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
This refers to adding unnecessary or redundant words to one's communication. Using 'imports into this country' or 'foreign imports' for example, in place of simply 'imports' bloats the sentence. Often a speaker's words are inflated so as to over whelm the audience or lend false credibility to what is being said. Other examples of bloating include referring to janitors or custodial staf as 'environmental hygienists' or 'sanitation engineers' or calling a routine trip a 'fact finding mission'.
MPX- Public Trust of the Government/Participation
Use of Bureaucratic language undermines civilian participation and trust in the government
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Numerous problems are associated with the misuse of language in government. They include the distortion of meaning and reality, the effect of distancing one from a sense of personal responsibility for their actions ,and deception, whereby language is used to misinform or manipulate. Moreover, many public management problems and the general lack of trust in government may be rooted in the language of bureaucracy. Language, after al, is the means by which public officials articulate the practices of government. Language also shapes our thoughts and frames the nature of public issues. Five problems, in particular, are identified.
MPX- Personal Responsibility
Impersonal, confusing language takes away the personal responsibility from the hands of policy makers- it makes “killing” less harsh
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Related to the problem of impersonality is the effect of removing responsibility. When words like 'client' or 'case' are substituted for the actual person receiving the public service, the speaker or bureaucrat risks distancing themselves from any responsibility for their actions. The use of impersonal language reduces the psychological proximity to the act, to reality, and to the targeted individual (Hummel, 1994; Killingsworth, 1984). For example, when a term like 'ordinance' is used for 'bombs' and phrases like 'servicing the target' or 'deploying ordinance' become commonplace, the reality and harshness of the act of 'kiling' is diminished. Such language lessens or even removes personal responsibility. Often the institutional message that is communicated becomes sterile. The person communicating is thus insulated from the consequences of her or his actions.
MPX- Government Coercion
Bureaucratic confusion serves as a vehicle for government manipulation and control of the population
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
When misunderstanding of communication is the goal, bureaucratese serves as the vehicle for deception. Misinformation distorts reality and may foster suspicion and cynicism among the public. Manipulation is not only an abuse of language, but also a tool to control and influence people. When government is the perpetrator, this has the potential to be used on a massive scale. An example would be former U.S. President George Bush's forest policy which was referred to as an 'over-mature tree harvest'. Environmentalists not familiar with the phrase would be less inclined to oppose this than what in reality it was: cutting old-growth, pristine forests. Similarly, 'intensive forest management' is a much more palpable, albeit manipulative term than 'clear cuting'. Another example is the' invasions' or 'wars' that used to be 'fought' by soldiers; these have become 'peacekeeping' or 'rescue' 'missions' in the name of defence and the national security interest.
MPX- Sensitization/Sanitation of language
The Bureaucratic language of confusion helps distort harsh realities and sensitize us to violence everyday
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Often, we are so 'sensitized' to manipulative language that we do not even notice its manipulative tendencies. Many forms of bureaucratese exist in our everyday vocabulary and have become an accepted part of our culture. For example, public housing has become known as 'substandard housing'. This term is a polite way of describing conditions that often approach a near warehousing of people. It also improperly implies both society's acceptance of housing that is, by definition, unacceptable housing and that all public housing is inadequate. Likewise, the 'poor' are now called the 'disadvantaged'. This replacement term implies a less problematic, less 'real' condition, but it also suggests a handicap requiring public attention and assistance.
***AFF MISC!
A2: Acronyms PIC
Acronyms good- they’re the best option when writing- eliminating them would only reduce clarity.
Liberman 11. (Mark, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, Faculty Director of College Houses and Academic Services, Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science. “An independent establishment is an establishment which is not part of an independent establishment” April 20, 2011. ps)
Matt Negrin at Politico is teasing Cass Sunstein over his 4/13/2011 memo "Final Guidance on Implementing the Plain Writing Act of 2010" ("Deciphering 'Plain Language' Edict", 4/19/2011):
The White House has a new mission for agencies: Ditch the jargon, and speak “plainly” to the public.
But don’t look to the White House to lead by example.
Cass Sunstein, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is calling on federal workers to stop using “confusing, technical, and acronym-filled language.” To help them out, he’s issued “final guidance” on how to talk straight and not garbled – in convenient PDF form.
The “official interagency working group” created for this mandate is the Plain Language Action and Information Network. That’s right, “PLAIN.” An acronym.
The PLAIN business didn't bother me, despite the implicit irony of creating an acronym for the task force charged with reducing the use of acronyms. Acronyms in general strike me as a good thing, or at least as a better thing than any of the alternatives, and therefore I don't believe that reducing or eliminating them would actually improve the clarity of bureaucratic or technical writing.
Both in bureaucracy and in technology, there are lots of precisely-defined entities and concepts for which there are no single English words ("National Institute of Child Health and Human Development"; "Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor"; and so on). You can't have well-run organizations, or clear scientific and technical communication, without tens or hundreds of thousands of named entities of this sort. And when you need to write about them, you have three choices: you can clog up your prose with many repetitions of the long-winded official names; you can use vague anaphoric references; or you can use acronyms (NICHD or MOSFET, in the cited cases).
Using acronyms is by far the best of these three choices, as long as the meaning of the acronym is plain to your audience, or is explained at the start of the passage where it's used.
A2: Ethnonymy/Toponymy
Names and pronunciations are never faithful and deferring to supposedly authentic pronunciation creates the illusion that we have avoided ethnocentrism while in fact re-entrenching it
Derbyshire 2k. (John, author, reviewer, and opinion journalist. “The Onomastic Cringe,” The Weekly Standard. January 17, 2000
ps)
Ethnonymy — the naming of peoples — is apparently headed down the same slippery slope that toponymy — the naming of places — embarked on twenty years ago, when we all had to start saying "Beijing" and "Mumbai" out of imagined deference to the sensibilities of the Third World. Toponymical practice has now passed far beyond the bounds of reason into a realm of utter lunacy. The other day I needed to know the name of that wee gulf up in the top right-hand corner of the Mediterranean. I pulled down my Times Atlas of the World and got the answer: "Ïskenderun körfezi." Now, I am sure that somewhere in there is the Turkish word for "gulf," but alas, I had mislaid my Turkish dictionary. (So I went to the attic and looked the place up in my grandfather's 1922 atlas. "Gulf of Alexandretta". Ah.)
Granted, it is a nice courtesy to refer to peoples and their places by the names they themselves use. But why is this consideration supposed to override all others? Here are some of the others.
Educational. How are teachers supposed to get even the brute facts of geography, history and ethnology into kids' heads when the names keep changing? And when the new names are written in a way that nobody but a master of comparative graphetics can pronounce? Who, exactly, is better off for calling Gypsies "Roma" and Jerusalem "Yerushalayim/Al-Quds"? Imagine a bright tenth-grader who wants to do a project on the Opium Wars. He finds a good library with lots of excellent books on the topic, some of them published decades ago (e.g. Maurice Collis's Foreign Mud, still — after 50 years — one of the best Opium War books). He reads of action going on in places called Canton, Swatow and Amoy. But where are those places? He will not find them on any school atlas published since about 1980. I could tell him, if he knew to ask me, that those cities are nowadays called Guangzhou, Shantou and Xiamen; but of course he doesn't know. Why are we thus distracting him from his historical researches? Don't kids face enough distractions?
Phonetic. The principle we started out with was: If a foreign name comes to the attention of English-speakers we are entitled to Anglicize it for our convenience. The Swedish city-name "Göteborg," for example, contains two sounds — one vowel, one consonant — that English-speakers cannot produce without special training. No prob: we'll call it "Gothenburg."
This very sensible principle has been replaced by a new one: Foreign names must be rendered in their native orthography; or, when that involves some alphabet different from ours, in a transcription as phonetically faithful as possible.
The trouble is, this doesn't work. "Peking" is a fair approximation to the way most southern Chinese pronounce the name of their capital. "Beijing" is a shot at the official — under the current regime — northern pronunciation, but it really gets us no closer. English-speakers voice the "b," which should be unvoiced; and they Frenchify the "j" into [ʤ], a sound that does not occur in Chinese. And of course nobody attempts the tones, a non-optional feature of Chinese pronunciation. (With wrong tones, beijing means "background.")
So the net result of all this upheaval is that a familiar Anglicization of a foreign name has been replaced by another Anglicization, no closer than the first. Was our journey really necessary?
Fairness. The need to call peoples and places by their local names is entirely a figment of the Anglo-Saxon liberal imagination — yet another aspect of the absurd cultural cringing our civilization has gone in for this past thirty years. (I hereby christen the whole phenomenon under discussion here "The Onomastic Cringe.")
The beneficiaries of this consideration do not reciprocate. Chinese atlases show England's great university city as Niujin, with no hint that we locals actually pronounce it "Oxford." I have no doubt the Hottentots still call my own people what they have always called them — "white devils," probably.
There is the same asymmetry here that Peter Brimelow noticed in Alien Nation. After a survey of U.S. immigration policy, Brimelow decided to see how things were done in those countries that send us immigrants. He put through calls to China, India and Mexico to ask what rules there were for immigrating to those countries. The answers, in a nutshell: you better be Chinese, Indian or Mexican.
Plain English Solves
Plain English overcomes the problems of buerocratic language
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
Government has become bound by bureaucratese and it's 'vocabulary of thought'. This language has become institutionalized within public agencies. A deconstruction of the existing language is necessary to move government forward to permit government executives to ask new questions, rethink old problems, and reorient the very nature of public service (Farmer, 1995). What is needed is an alternative that is not only a less biased, narrow, and loaded language, but one that is more accurate, plain, and simple: In short, plain English3. The solution is known and is obvious, but the reality of ending bureaucratese and adopting plain English will be easier said than done. Perhaps one key to solving the problem is the growing scholarly interest in postmodern analysis in public administration that can be used to further deconstruct bureaucratese and to assist in understanding the consequences of such misuses of language. The academic community must also encourage practicing public administrators to consider such postmodern tools in their everyday communications and training.
Government must begin to communicate in a more concise, direct, and understandable manner. Public statements and documents need to be shortened and need to adopt basic principles of plain English. This means, eliminating large, run-on sentences, multiple clauses, and euphemistic and bloated expressions. It means using fewer abbreviations, acronyms, and insider jargon. The bureaucratic practice of running several nouns together as in 'the conference program committee recommendations...' and other complex syntax should be replaced wherever possible with concise sentences organized as 'subject-verb- noun'.
A good rule to follow is to think about the audience. If government agencies and employees consider their customers and clients prior to and during communications, much of the confusing vocabulary can be eliminated. This will require bureaucrats to write in question-and-answer format so as to keep on target with their audience. It will require them to replace the 'passive voice' with an active, conversational voice. Stating what will be done, why, by whom, and how will make government communications user-friendly.
Plan English K2 Public Participation
Using plain English in public administration encourages citizen participation in government
Watson and Lynch, 98 *University of Hawaii at Hilo AND **Louisiana State University (1998, Robert P. and Thomas D., Public Policy and Administration, “Plain English and Public Administration”, 13:107, Sage SW)
The byproduct of improved communications through the use of plain English are numerous. Most obviously, it would improve public understanding of governmental rules and regulations. This could, in turn, result in increased compliance with regulations and limit the amount of time and resources devoted to answering questions. Better communications might enhance public participation in government and would be a step in the right direction in improving the distrust of and hostility toward bureaucracy. If the public understood governmental programs or at least the rationale behind them, it might serve to build support for and confidence in what government is attempting to accomplish.
random
Weaponization of space is unpopular- even among conservative republicans, concerns about misperception cause backlash.
Weiner 5. (Tim, reporter for the New York Times. “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs.” May 18, 2005. ps)
Despite objections from members of Congress who thought "space should be sanctified and no weapons ever put in space," Mr. Teets, then the Air Force under secretary, told the space-warfare symposium last June that "that policy needs to be pushed forward."
Last month, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who leads the United States Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services nuclear forces subcommittee that the goal of developing space weaponry was to allow the nation to deliver an attack "very quickly, with very short time lines on the planning and delivery, any place on the face of the earth."
Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who is chairman of the subcommittee, worried that the common aero vehicle might be used in ways that would "be mistaken as some sort of attack on, for example, Russia."
"They might think it would be a launch against them of maybe a nuclear warhead," Senator Sessions said. "We want to be sure that there could be no misunderstanding in that before we authorize going forward with this vehicle."
The plan would cause international backlash and be hugely expensive.
Weiner 5. (Tim, reporter for the New York Times. “Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs.” May 18, 2005. ps)
Senior military and space officials of the European Union, Canada, China and Russia have objected publicly to the notion of American space superiority.
They think that "the United States doesn't own space - nobody owns space," said Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a policy analysis group in Washington that tends to be critical of the Pentagon. "Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law."
No nation will "accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star," Ms. Hitchens told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting last month. "I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."
International objections aside, Randy Correll, an Air Force veteran and military consultant, told the council, "the big problem now is it's too expensive."
The Air Force does not put a price tag on space superiority. Published studies by leading weapons scientists, physicists and engineers say the cost of a space-based system that could defend the nation against an attack by a handful of missiles could be anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion.
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